The Daily - Running an Election in the Heart of Election Denialism

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

This episode contains strong language. Hundreds of candidates on the ballot in November still deny that President Biden won in 2020 — a level of denialism that is fueling harassment and threats toward election workers. Few have experienced those attacks as viscerally as election workers in Arizona. Today, we speak with the top election official in the state’s largest county. Guest: Stephen Richer, the recorder of Maricopa County in Arizona. Background reading: Election officials are on alert as voting begins for midterm elections, the biggest test of the American election system since former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 results launched an assault on the democratic process.Over 370 Republican candidates have cast doubt on the 2020 election despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, according to a New York Times investigation.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Half the Republican candidates on the ballot in November's election still deny that President Biden won the 2020 election, a level of denialism that is fueling an unprecedented volume of harassment and threats toward election workers. Few have experienced those attacks as viscerally as election workers in Arizona, a state that Donald Trump still refuses to acknowledge he lost, and where the Republican candidates for governor, attorney general, and secretary

of state all embrace his false claim that the election was stolen. Today, a conversation with the top election official in Arizona's biggest county about what it's like to oversee voting when so many of the voters themselves doubt the legitimacy of the process? It's Monday, October 24th. Monday, October 24th. Okay, so Stephen, thank you for making time for us. I know that you're in the thick of it because early voting has actually started in Arizona. So every minute of time we take from you is precious.

So we're grateful. I appreciate the opportunity very much. Stephen Richer oversees elections in Maricopa County, which accounts for more than half of the voters in Arizona. He's a lifelong Republican. Right. So a true believer. A true believer. And in 2018, after a career in business and law, he decided to run for the local office of county recorder. I thought it was an office that was exciting. I thought it was an office where you're serving 4.5 million customers. That's how many people are in the Maricopa County,

in Maricopa County, and running a business that happens to be involved in politics. So you run, it is 2020. I'm curious, when did you begin to understand just how unusual that particular election was going to be? Was there a specific moment? And can you set the scene for us a little bit? On election day, I got to a voting location at 6 a.m. And I spent the entire day with my parents going around to different voting locations, speaking to people in line, handing out granola bars to try and garner some favor, introducing myself. Many people were not familiar with who I was, the position. And so I finished at 7pm when that was the last time to get in line for voting locations and probably got back to my home around 7.45, showered real quickly. It had been a long day. And then I logged on to see the first results at 8 p.m. And they were not very favorable,

to say the least. With the first results, I was down significantly. I think it was something like 85, 90,000 ballots disadvantage. And it was a blue wave in Maricopa County. And we thought there was a chance that Republicans would come back, but we didn't know to what extent. And so my victory party died pretty quickly. And I even tried to go to bed. That was impossible, though. And welcome back to the news at eight o'clock. We are staying on top of breaking news just outside of the Maricopa County Recorder's Office. But then I started noticing that there were people down at the tabulation center who were protesting, who were chanting, who were disrupting the process.

That's unprecedented here in Maricopa County. We'd never had people outside the tabulation center. I think that people had previously viewed it as a mundane but necessary administrative post, and it just had to keep on churning along, and that there was an understanding that this would be done and it would take longer than everyone would ideally like in their perfect world in which we would have results instantaneously, but that you didn't go and harass these Republicans, Democrats, independents, libertarians of all ages, many of whom are senior ages, working together at the tabulation center to tabulate the vote. We love Trump! We love Trump! We love Trump!

It doesn't appear that we'll ever have free and fair elections again. Why do you say that? Because of the rampant cheating that's happening in Wisconsin, Michigan, and even here in Arizona. And at that point, I became aware that this wasn't going to be like 2018. This wasn't going to be like 2016. USA! USA! USA! USA! So this is very striking. You are running for the post of overseeing elections in Maricopa County. The result of your election is uncertain at this moment,

and you're witnessing members of the public, voters, showing up and essentially harassing the people that you're running for the office of overseeing and working with, right? The people in this election office. So this seems like a complicated moment for you. Not terribly. I thought it was preposterous. America is awake and we are never backing down. And I want to salute these amazing people.

Out here for days. And we are never backing down. And I want to salute these amazing people. Alex Jones was out there in the parking lot and it immediately took on a militant vibe with people with weapons there. We are standing in defense of the republic now at this incredible moment. People in military-esque garb in the parking lot saying, stop the count, stop the count, which was befuddling to me because with each successive release of results, everyone on the Republican slate was getting closer and closer to catching their Democratic opponent, including, most noteworthily, President Trump. You don't like America, leave it! Leave it if you don't love it!

Exactly! Leave it! America is awake! It was doing nobody a service, and for that reason I posted to social media a number of times that this is not helpful, that they should leave. What exactly did you say? Because it's interesting, you're talking about voters you assume are Republican,

and you're taking to social media, maybe it's Twitter, and saying to them, desist. What specifically are you telling them? I forget what the exact language was, but basically, guys, cut it off. This isn't helping anyone, and we want them to count the votes. The chant should have been, count the votes. Thank you, thank you. Keep on going. Let us know if we can get you donuts or coffee.

Did any of that surprise you, knowing what you knew up to that point about how Donald Trump had primed voters to be thinking about this election, to actually see it physically showing up outside the office that you're seeking to hold? Yes. You know, the immediate sensationalization of it, the immediate jumping to a conclusion that things had gone wrong, the fact that somebody like Alex Jones would be welcomed in immediately and embraced and part of the fold was surprising and disturbing to me. Mm-hmm. So eventually, of course, the votes keep getting counted. Yes. And you win that office. I do.

And so once you win, but knowing what you have seen outside the election office, are you starting to get a little bit nervous about what it's going to mean to occupy this office that you have just won? Well, more immediately, it disrupted my beautiful plans for my post-successful election weeks. I had planned on rehabilitating the shambles of my professional career just because I had put so much on the back burner in terms of my health, my life, my law practice, talking to family members. I planned on taking a vacation for the first time in over two years, but immediately I got thrown into this morass of misinformation

and trying to distill what was fact from what was fiction. And I was already seen by so many of the people who were engaging with this as the potential answer to these questions. And I was grappling with all this for the first time as well. I didn't know what fractional voting meant, which was one of the theories that was being bandied about. I was watching all these crazy YouTube videos and researching all these theories, and it was not the romanticized post-election vision that I had yearned for. Tell me about some of these terms that you're starting to throw around. For example, I think you said fractional voting. What are some of these claims that even though you are just a candidate elect, you're not yet inaugurated, you suddenly feel you need to start grappling with?

Fractional voting, which is a facially preposterous claim, is the idea that each vote is tallied not as one or zero, a binary number, such that when President Trump gets a vote, it would go in his column as a one. Fractional voting suggests that the machine would count it as 1.007 or something like that, such that the theory goes it wouldn't immediately trigger any sort of concerns, but that it would incrementally add up. It's a little bit like the old movie Office Space, where they're basically rounding off the pennies into an account. Creates a fortune for the office workers, right? Exactly, except for I think they got a decimal wrong in that movie. So this is a conspiracy theory that nefarious forces have tinkered with voting machines in such a way that presumably Republican votes would be counted as less than one full vote.

Yes, you have the gist of it, but it seems like it's straight out of a Robert Ludlum novel. Got it. What other theories are you confronting in this period just after you win? Switching votes, that the tabulation machines would read it as a Trump vote but would align it in the Biden column, that Sharpies were causing overvotes or that they weren't causing votes to be tabulated accurately, that the tabulation equipment was connected to the internet and therefore susceptible to outside manipulation, that the voter rolls had been inflated with hundreds of thousands of unlawful voters, that ballots had been flown in from South Korea or other places and injected into the system such that there was a high number of unlawful votes. I mean, the breadth of the theories is just mind-boggling.

And they're all committed to the end goal. Which is? The end goal is to explain the world, to explain how Arizona went for Joe Biden when that's incongruent with everything that they've seen. That's incongruent with the fact that when Joe Biden came, he had very small rallies. Donald Trump had enormous rallies. I saw lots of Donald Trump flags. I didn't see any Joe Biden flags. Then one thing that we have seen over the last two years is that it doesn't matter if you punch

out one theory, you pick up another one or maybe even go back to one that hasn't been punched out recently. So as all these pretty wild conspiracy theories about Sharpie pens and fractional voting are flying around, I wonder how you in your new role decide how you're going to handle them, how seriously to take them. You use the phrase kind of facially preposterous, right? So obviously in your mind, these aren't true, but how seriously do you decide to take the job

of either looking into them or just publicly dismissing them? Seriously, I spent a lot of time over November and December looking into these theories and I tried to treat them. Why? Can I ask you why? Because they were from people who had supported me, people who had voted for me,

people who had knocked doors for me. And those people had my friendship, my respect, my sympathy. And so I was not, you know, oh, you're a buffoon, you know, come back when you have a real idea. Evidence. Well, and because I was clinging at that point to the post-Renaissance notion that if I just explained this to you, if I understood where you were coming from, if I understood your theory and I explained why your theory could not be so, then you would accept that. I later learned

that that's not the case. So what does it look like for you to go investigate these things and then try to bring your findings to these Republican voters, to the people who voted for you, your supporters? I wonder if you can describe that. Increasingly uncomfortable. It became increasingly apparent that I was supposed to get on board or that I would be written off. And this really came to a head at an event that I went to in early spring, late winter of 2021. So this would have been two and a half months into my being in office. The event was the grassroots Tea Party activist of North Phoenix or something like that. They'd invited me as a speaker and I had spoken at their events

before and they consisted of people who had supported me, some people who had volunteered for my campaign, and I had a friendship with the lady who administered the, ran the events. But just a few weeks prior to that, the county had done an additional test of the tabulation equipment to ascertain whether it had been connected to the internet at any point during the election season to determine whether any malware had been installed and to see if the tabulation machine was still accurately tabulating votes as it was intended to. And the answer to all of those was it came out 100% clean. And so I went to this event and there were maybe 50 people in the audience. And one of the first questions I was asked was,

were the tabulation machines connected to the internet? Right. And you have a ready answer because you've just run a test. No, I mean, it felt like an eternity in my mind. Maybe I only paused for one second, but it felt like an eternity because it was just, here it is. Here's the fork. Here's the fork that every single politician is being pressed with in Arizona, every single Republican politician, at least. I can say something that I 100% know to be accurate, but I will be deemed a traitor. I will lose the good opinion of people who previously supported me. I will be harassed.

Or I can say yes, and I will be momentarily a friend of this group. They'll feel like I'm there fighting the good fight. But it would be a lie. So going into that room in North Phoenix, that's the fork you understand you're going to be facing. Exactly. One way is the path of difficult truths. The other is the path of essentially colluding with conspiracy theorists. But also adulation and perhaps political expediency.

And so in that moment, what do you do? And so in that moment, what do you do? I don't know why. Maybe the way I was programmed or the way certain people influenced my life. But it was never a question. I was going to tell the truth. But I just saw it so clearly at that point, and I knew I was going to catch hell for it. And what kind of hell do you catch?

Can you describe it? I could barely get in a word edgewise. Lots of people screaming at me, lots of people saying some pretty ugly things to me. The reason you think that is because you're an idiot or they attack your motives. Have you been bought off by Soros? Have you no ethic to your profile? You're a fake Christian. you know, get your Mormon

ass back to Utah. I'm not even LDS, but I'm from Utah. Was there a point in this meeting where you ever felt physically uncomfortable? Not just... I felt physically uncomfortable because I left and people followed me out and they started banging on the windshields of my car. Wow. And, you know. They're basically chasing after you. It was an awkward, intense situation, the first of which I'd ever experienced. I then had similar experiences when, like a fool, I continued to go to some of these events.

But these were the people who supported me. These were my people who were friends continued to go to some of these events. But these were the people who supported me. These were my people who were friends. I was going to all these events. I just spent two years of my life going every single night to various Republican events. And so this was so jarring to me that I was no longer a welcome figure and that going to these might be hailed with a chorus of boos and might even result in these uncomfortably confrontational, borderline physical scenarios. And eventually I retreated. What do you mean retreated?

I stopped going. To these kinds of events? Yeah, so now I haven't gone to a Republican party event or a Republican legislative district meeting or a county meeting or anything of the like in some time. I go to instead community groups, business groups, just groups that want to learn about election administration. And I guess fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice. Well, I had to be fooled about, I think like seven times before eventually I learned my lesson.

Hmm. So if my math about dates is correct, it's early 2021. You are now firmly in your role as the top election official in Maricopa County. You have decided you no longer really can go to these Republican meetings and explain why these theories are wrong. It's getting too uncomfortable. It's getting too dangerous. And yet these conspiracy theories, they're not going away. You keep having them hurled at you. So did this all keep escalating beyond what you experienced in those rooms? Were you ever directly threatened? Yes. And it very much escalated. So at the beginning of 2021,

the county and the Senate had been going back and forth and back and forth regarding need for additional audits, reviews, assessments of the 2020 election. And it was for that reason that we had done our extra statutory review of the tabulation equipment in early February. Well, that wasn't good enough for the Arizona Senate, who had really at this point started swimming in the waters of conspiracy theories of this industry. And so they enlisted a group that had no expertise relevant to conducting a full-scale election audit that had associated with people who were firmly in the Stop the Steal camp. But at that time, we didn't know who the heck Doug Logan and the Cyber Ninjas were. time, we didn't know who the heck Doug Logan and the Cyber Ninjas were. We just understood them to be a small company from Sarasota, Florida, that had no background in elections. So just to explain,

unlike you and your office, the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate, they choose the other fork in the road, which is to appease those who believe these conspiracy theories. They hire a company called Cyber Ninjas, which, as you just said, very much wants to find fraud to investigate what happened in Arizona during the 2020 election. Correct. Correct. And suddenly, even though you already know that there has been no fraud in Maricopa County, there's this new investigation being layered on top of you. Exactly.

And so what do you do and how does it affect you and the people in your office? Well, this new investigation becomes the national, international rallying point for the Stop the Steal movement. All of a sudden, we start seeing millions of dollars flowing in through different outfits to fund this endeavor. So we see people like Phil Waldron, who was very instrumental in the plot to keep Donald Trump in office, like Mike Lindell, who I don't think needs any description of what he's been up to. Well, just in case, the Mander ones, the pillow empire who supports Donald Trump's theories about election fraud. And who has spent millions upon millions and millions of dollars funding these efforts. We see state legislators from almost representing like 35 different states coming into Maricopa County to witness

this self-styled forensic audit being done with Maricopa County's election equipment, being done with Maricopa County's electronic data, being done with Maricopa County's electronic data, being done with Maricopa County's ballots from the 2020 election. And so that's really the point at which we are elevated from an analogous situation to any other battleground state such as Georgia or Michigan to where we are the bell of the ball in the Stop the Steal world because we are the first ones that welcome the circus in. And we start seeing these half-formulated theories that are unsubstantiated but are put out through social media accounts.

And so in May of 2021, when the War Room account, In May of 2021, when the War Room account, the official, unofficial account of the Cyber Ninjas investigation, says that Maricopa County employees in the elections department, which is to say my employees, unlawfully deleted files from the 2020 election. Boom. They're going to war with Maricopa County. They're going to war with those who validated President Biden's victory. Got it. So suddenly, a legitimate-sounding investigation... That had been given the backing, the support... Of the Arizona Senate. The validity of the Arizona Senate, accuses your office of committing fraud.

Correct. Wow. So this is a whole new level of pressure on you all, and no doubt invites a whole new round of public outcry, and I'm guessing harassment. Yes. And that is the point at which I started receiving lots and lots and lots, hundreds of emails,

and tens of phone calls and messages. And so we decided as a county, enough. We are not just going to let this continue forward. We're going to start pushing back. And it really took off when President Trump, in one of his missives to his website, wrote one about Maricopa County and how we had deleted all files relating to the 2020 election. And I was in the office because I always work on weekends. And I'm, you know, had on my screen some of the files that he alleged to have been deleted from the 2020 election. And it was just so ludicrous that I snapped, I guess. And I sent out a tweet that this has become unhinged or something to that effect. This is as readily falsifiable as saying two plus two

equals five. And eventually that was retweeted and retweeted and retweeted. And all of a sudden, we're off to the races in a negative way in terms of being the national spokesperson for pushing back on the ongoing insanity in Maricopa County. And I happen to know that that tweet leads specifically to more threats because the Department of Justice has released one of them. And now that you have just told the story you did, looking at the language of the threat and seeing that they're very much connected, Now that you have just told the story you did, I'm looking at the language of the threat and seeing that they're very much connected. Somebody who saw your tweet noticed that you called these claims unhinged, leaves you a voicemail. So I see you're for fair and competent elections, as that's what it says here on your homepage for your recorder position you're trying to fly here but you call things unhinged and insane

lies when there's a forensic audit going on you need to check yourself you need to do your fucking job right because other people from other states are watching your ass you fucking renege on this deal or give them any more troubles your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting. So that tweet leads directly to yet another pretty explicit death threat. Yeah, and that is by no means the only message that we received to that effect. And I, unfortunately, am not the only one who received it. And I, unfortunately, am not the only one who received it. Even non-public-facing employees of the office have received similar correspondence.

When you heard that message, what did you think to yourself? I probably just moved it to the folder that I'd been keeping all these in. I mean, I'd received 30 that week. I mean, did you ever feel your life was in danger from one of these? Did you think someone would actually come to you and it wouldn't just be a voicemail that they might actually try to hurt you?

Yes, only because I was told by professionals when I was supposed to take certain precautions. So at this point, are you starting to question your decision to ever seek this office? No, absolutely not. With each one of these instances, the value proposition only goes up. And so at this point, I'm starting to rethink what my office experience is like. that I can run a great operation and that I'm a committed public servant who will ethically and intelligently

perform the tasks of my office. I'm reframing that to, this is the service to my state. This is a service to my country that is akin to military service for four years, for which I've committed, and that there could not be a more important conversation going on in the country right now than this crisis of democracy that happens to have just settled on Maricopa County. We'll be right back.

So everything we've been describing up to this point, Stephen, that was fallout from 2020. But pretty quickly, you and the people in your office enter the next election cycle, which is the 2022 midterms. And it becomes pretty clear that election denialism becomes a pretty dominant theme in many of the major races in Arizona in these midterms. In fact, it to seek your party's nomination while making claims that you absolutely know to be untrue? We had always hoped that, just give it time. always hope that just give it time. You know, the passions of the moment, the energies of the moment, the frustrations of the moment, you know, people are hurt. People are hurt in the post-2020 election context. People don't like losing. I don't like losing. You don't like losing. You know, hopefully we respond to it a little differently, but we never thought that it would just continue and continue to be such a critical part of the Arizona political discourse. But 2020 never left us.

Joining us now, the woman herself, Carrie Lake. Carrie, you have to be the most popular person in Arizona right now. Well, I wouldn't go that far. The most popular person in Arizona probably is Donald Trump. That's true. Being asked about the Cyber Ninjas' quote, forensic audit was one of the first litmus tests for anyone who was declaring candidacy for a statewide race.

How would you have handled that differently? I would have paused because it's really important to get things like this right, not to rush things when there are signs that there were trouble and there were plenty of them. So almost immediately upon entering the field, you were asked about something that was repugnant to some of the business and professional classes within the Republican Party.

And they want to get to the bottom of it because they don't feel their vote counted. They don't know exactly what happened, but they want the report and they want us to fix what is wrong so that our elections do matter in the future and that they are free and fair. the future and that they are free and fair. But that was such an animating, critical, omnipresent factor for much of the base and the committed Trump right, such that it just smoothly transitioned from cyber ninjas to these candidates. And all of a sudden, the whole night stunk to high heaven. I think everybody with half a brain and a little bit of common sense realizes November 3rd, the election. The industry morphed to a period where people could find such, in my mind, undeserved popularity simply based on a willingness to go where maybe some of the traditional candidates were unwilling to go. There's no way Joe Biden won by 81 million votes.

You have to be smoking Hunter's crack pipe to think that. Right. It's almost like the extended investigation into what happened in 2020 in Arizona, from what you're saying, it almost guarantees that the next election is going to be about those same issues. So once these Republican candidacies that are so rooted in election denialism are announced, and these candidates are traveling the state and they're fomenting this even more. How do you start to prepare logistically for these primaries? Because unlike in 2020, when this was all new and a surprise and kind of a shock, this time, you kind of know what's coming, right? So how do you start to prepare for elections in which claims of fraud are going to be central? prepare for elections in which claims of fraud are going to be central?

We have a giant fence outside of our tabulation center now. We have sort of a First Amendment zone where protesters can go. We have cut out different ingress and egress points because during the August primary, there were people who were out in the streets trying to stop cars who were coming into our facility for temporary workers and take pictures of them and take pictures of their license plates and trying to harass them. We have cameras in our facility where people try to identify individual employees and then post about them, make allegations about them online, harass them even on channels such as LinkedIn. So when that primary vote happens, just on a technical level, how does it go? Is it smooth? Are there claims of fraud?

Well, those are two very different questions. So on a technical level, it was a resounding success. Ballots went out on time. Ballots were accurately printed. Vote centers opened on time. Vote centers didn't have any lines. We had more vote center opportunities than ever before. We had a higher participation level than ever before in Maricopa County. We tabulated the votes accurately. We tabulated the votes faster than we'd previously tabulate them. So from a nuts and bolts standpoint, excellent. We feel great about it. Did people make claims of fraud? Yes. Did people send ugly messages? Gosh, yes. It felt like it was a football game where we won maybe 40 to seven, but it felt like we'd taken a physical beating after it.

And of course, at the end of those August primaries, it turns out that all the election deniers win their statewide offices, right? You have a Republican candidate for governor, AG, and secretary of state, all of whom embrace the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. And I have to imagine that for you, that's another very important moment in this long journey, because it means that you are guaranteed to have a general election in which fraud is front and center. Correct. It feels like if I'm you, then this moment where the three top candidates for state white office all embrace election denialism is a catch-22. And let me explain that. On the one hand, it's got to be easier for you and your staff

if Republicans in Arizona, the Cary Lakes, et cetera, if they win. Because if they win, they're far less likely to claim that there's any kind of large-scale fraud, and therefore you and your employees will be left alone. You won't be terribly harassed. On the other hand, if Republicans like Cary Lake win, that's a sign that people in Arizona are comfortable with, maybe even support election denialism. We'll know that because these candidates get elected and it's a big part of their campaigns. And that's probably not good for your office.

It's probably not good for democracy. So is that how you're seeing things? so is that how you're seeing things when i'm in a more contemplative period yes that is a very accurate characterization of how i'm seeing things although i think that you might overestimate the benefits accrued from the first scenario, which... If Republicans win. Correct. For instance, there wasn't all of a sudden after the August primary a new wave of people who say,

oh, it seems like they're doing a nice job in there. Or, oh, maybe they fixed things up. Or, oh, maybe this richer guy, you know, he got to work and, you know, he cleaned up the voter rolls. And we appreciate that. Well, doesn't that go back to the idea that, if we follow this Catch-22 idea, that perhaps it is in your best interest,

in the interest of your office, if these Republicans lose. Yes, there would be the short-term pain of people saying there was fraud, but there would be the theoretical long-term gain of the Republican Party reckoning with the denialism that's now so central to these candidacies. I guess what I'm asking is, will this only go away, this crisis that you exemplify, if the candidates who embrace it start to lose and lose at a pretty large scale? Is that the only way the party starts to expel this problem? I think that's probably accurate. I think that's probably accurate.

It's not for want of more information. It's not for want of more materials. But right now, this strategy, which is recognized by many of those who embrace the strategy to be wholly false, is too profitable either in terms of political power or financial power. Right. And, you know, in some ways, although we're certainly not characterized as such, politicians are highly rational actors and that they're responding to an incentive system. And so when I said that, you know, it guarantees that it will be part of the Arizona political discourse in the next few years. Well, if this if the defining feature of some of these campaigns and really maybe the the compelling but for cause of some of these successes is election denialism. denialism, and that is not only able to win a primary, but it's able to win a general election, then I think that without going on a limb here or getting too political, I think I can safely say that it will be replicated in Arizona for in future cycles. So weirdly for you as a Republican,

a movement Republican, a lifelong Republican, a passionate Republican, you very much need Republicans to lose for this denialism to go away as such a potent force. That's really complicated. Under that theory, I do think that that is one of the ways in which it goes away. I'm hopeful that there are other ways as well. I'm just not sure what they are.

I'm a firm believer that we are at an ugly moment in history. And I'm a firm believer that we're flirting with something that could be even worse. And where I grow frustrated with people is when they subsume it to sort of politics as usual. Yes, but. Okay, but the gas prices. Okay, but I'm a Republican. Okay, but I like this. Okay, but I still want access to the person,

so I'm going to donate $1,000. Are you kidding me? This person just said that he wants to take people from my office off in handcuffs. And you're going to normalize that? You're going to excuse that? Oh, well, he wasn't my choice in the primary. That doesn't give you license to support the person in the general election. And I would have thought that certain behaviors, which my office has been the target of over the past two years, would have been beyond the pale for more people than it turns out to be.

And that has been hard for me to deal with and has caused me to lose a friendship or two. Hmm. Or two. Sounds like more than two. More than two. I have to say, your whole energy as we've gotten to the end of this conversation has kind of changed. Or two. Sounds like more than two. More than two. I have to say, your whole energy as we've gotten to the end of this conversation has kind of changed.

And I don't know whether it's the line of questioning or some epiphany happening in your head, but you seem a little defeated. And I wonder if that's where your head is at this moment. No, it has more to do with my 1030 meeting. But I really am sort of dreading that particular meeting because it's quite frankly, it's on a topic that, you know, is very extracurricular and is unfortunate and is just the result of pressures that have been put on this office. And it's something that I don't want to have to deal with. And that does characterize a good percentage of my time, unfortunately, these days. Can I ask you what the meeting is about? It's regarding legal advice. So it is privileged even, in fact.

But, you know, like we produce enough legal work now just to sort of fully support a small boutique election law firm just because of the amount of scrutiny that we're under, the amount of lawsuits that we... I mean, I just added them all up yesterday. We've had 24 lawsuits challenging the validity or the integrity of our processes since I've been in office. 24. That's a lot. We've had a thousand public records requests this year. That's a lot. You know, it's almost like, you know, running an election is like running a long race and a lot of work goes into it and you're exhausted

by the end but now we're running a race where people are running out of the bleachers and trying to tackle us and it's like to what end sort of thing do you know is success that we just don't run the election this success that we just don't run the election, the success that we throw up our hands and say, you know, we quit. You know, just sort of how much abuse can a system of people take? How far can I push the staff? How many more public records requests

can I put on their plate? How many more meetings with skeptics can I make them take without the rubber band snapping? I worry about that on a more regular basis than I worry about who's the next guy to send me something that's really ugly or nasty. Well, Stephen, I want to thank you for your time. Good luck with the November election, and

we hope you stay safe. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. Hours after our interview, members of Stephen's staff experienced their latest case of harassment. Conservative activists stood outside the Maricopa County election headquarters and photographed the workers as they arrived, claiming that they were gathering potential evidence of fraud. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. In the race to replace Liz Truss as Prime Minister of Britain, Rishi Sunak, her opponent in the last election a mere 48 days ago, has emerged as the clear leader. Sunak's victory appeared increasingly likely after former Prime Minister Boris Johnson dropped out of the campaign on Sunday night. Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants, is now poised to become the first prime minister of color in British history.

And in China on Sunday, Xi Jinping secured an unprecedented third term as the country's leader after a series of dramatic meetings in which he promoted communist leaders seen as loyal to him and replaced those who might challenge him. Longstanding rules were supposed to force Xi from power after two terms, but he has since eliminated those rules, paving the way for a lifetime in power. paving the way for a lifetime in power. Today's episode was produced by Aastha Chaturvedi and Eric Krupke, with help from Nina Feldman.

It was edited by Michael Benoit, with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Jack Healy. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro.

See you tomorrow.