This piece from 60 Minutes is worth your time, Arizona election officials subjected to violent threats undaunted in defense elections. It is an interview with a number of persons, all Republicans. Primarily it is focused on Stephen Richer, who was elected as Maricopa County’s recored in 2020 as well as Shelby Busch, an election denier and Maricopa County’s Republican Party vice-chair. In addition, Clint Hickman, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican attorney are interviewed. Ginsberg was once general council to the RNC, he represented the Bush campaign in the 2000 Florida recount, and worked for the Romney campaign.
Let me stress: four Republicans (two of whom are currently in office). But one is quite unlike the other. There is also the Republican who wasn’t interviewed who is also discussed below.
I would note that Richer and Hickman have both faced intense public opprobrium because they followed the law and the data and, worse, have faced numerous death-threats. At least one of the men who threatened Richer in serving a prison sentence as a result (two others have been convicted and are awaiting sentencing). One of the men who threatened Hickman is also in prison.
First, Richer.
Richer took office after the 2020 election, when his own party was up in arms over allegations of fraud. It was Richer’s first elected office and he knew what to do.
“They just need answers,” Richer said he thought. “It’s not that complicated of an issue. It’s just people are uncertain. They expected Donald Trump to win. I expected Donald Trump to win in Maricopa County. He didn’t win. They have questions. As soon as we give them logical, factual answers, all will be well.”But that’s not what happened. There were multiple investigations. The Republican-led State Senate commissioned a hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million paper ballots, which reconfirmed Mr. Biden won. Statewide, prosecutions for illegal voting involved a total of 19 ballots.
Note a couple of things.
First, the fact that evidence and reason did not work (indeed, the piece makes it quite clear that no amount of evidence matters to those denying the veracity of the results). It didn’t matter than reality could be demonstrated, nor that the officials conducting the process were Republicans who almost certainly voted for Trump. To reiterate Richer above: “I expected Donald Trump to win in Maricopa County.”
Second, there were 19 ballots that led to prosecutions for illegal voting statewide. There were 3,420,565 ballots cast in the state in 2020 according to official numbers from the Secretary of State’s office. That means 0.00005554637903% of the vote was found to be illegal in AZ. This is a number so small as to be meaningless to the outcome. Moreover, given how hard perfection is to achieve in any endeavor, it is almost a miracle that that is the number. But, it is also why honest people cannot say, “There was zero fraud in the election” and why other can claims that fraud exists without any sense of proportion if not the implication that something very sinister is going on. But scope matters. Nonetheless, those 19 ballots are the kind of thing that will go into the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Fraud Database, likely as 19 separate entries and then be used as examples of massive fraud. (I have written extensively on that database here and here).
Second, Hickman.
He has been a supervisor on the board for 11 years and was among Trump’s most loyal supporters in 2020. Then-President Trump publicly thanked him in 2020 at a campaign rally days before the election. But after all the votes were tallied, Hickman found no evidence of fraud and said so when he and the Republican majority Board of Supervisors voted to certify the county’s election. Since then, he says he has been accused of treason and received death threats.
“I’ve lost count. I have lost count,” Hickman said. “And so have my colleagues. And so have election workers.”
In one instance, Hickman got a call from Mark A. Rissi, who threatened to “lynch your stupid lying Commie a—.”
Rissi, who in the voicemail went on to threaten to hang him, received a two-and-a-half year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to sending threatening communications. Hickman recalled another message he received he called “chilling”.
The caller stated, “‘We know the restaurants that you are in. And we know where your kids go to school,’” Hickman said.
Again, Hickman was a Trump supporter. And, again, these threats are serious enough to put people behind bars. Moreover, the notion that an elected official, properly doing their job, should face threats to their children is sickening.
Third, Busch.
“What I am doing is, I am shining a big bright light on the disdain and the arrogance of some of the elected officials,” she said. “They are elected to represent the interests of the people. And until they are ready to step up and do that, then there will be unrest.”
Busch believes state statutes and regulations were violated. She still questions whether signature verification was proper and whether some ballots were collected illegally. In a recent case, a judge disqualified Busch — an administrator in a medical practice — from testifying as an expert because he said she was “obviously unqualified…not even in the ballpark.”
“That’s one judge’s opinion who is a radical leftist who is legislating from the bench and I don’t believe that it had any merit in my credibility whatsoever,” she said.
The write-up leave out, I think, the most telling interchange wherein Pelley tries to get Busch to explain what evidence she has. Eventually Pelley says something to the effect that she is right because she says she is and Busch agreed. Additionally, she claimed divine inspiration.
In a speech, recorded on video earlier this year, Busch said she would “lynch” Richer.
“If Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him,” she said in March. “I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country.”
Busch later said she was referring to a “political lynching.”
“It’s referred to as destroying someone’s career. It was not ever meant physically in any way, shape, or form,” Busch said. “Probably a poor choice of words.”
A “poor choice of words,” indeed. But a very telling choice.
I would note that the word “lynch” showed up in one of the threats to Hickman. Not only does lynching have a troubled history in the United States, it is a word directly associated with mob justice.
By the way, Busch was rewarded for her behavior by being a delegate to the RNC and being the delegate who announced Arizona’s delegation for Trump during the roll call of the states. The GOP is now the party of people like Busch, rather than Richer or Hickman. If you are reading this and you consider yourself a Republican, ask yourself which Republican Party you would prefer. Then consider that as ironic or counterintuitive as it may seem, voting for Harris (or, at a bare minimum, not voting for Trump) is the best pathway you have is avoiding the party being controlled by people like Busch who reject evidence and threaten violence on those who present it.
Fourth, Ginsberg.
“The evidence to back up the allegations of fraud and elections being unreliable simply does not exist,” Ginsberg said.
[…]
“Donald Trump and his supporters brought 64 cases. They lost 63 of them outright,” Ginsberg explained. The case they won related to a small number of ballots “far from outcome determinative,” he says.
Election deniers have said that they lost in court because the judges weren’t fair.
“Under the rule of law, you have every right to submit your litigation,” Ginsberg said. “But under the rule of law, a conservative principle, a Republican principle for as long as I’ve been practicing election law, you have to accept the rulings of the court.”
Again: this is a man who has spent his career working for Republicans at the highest levels.
The Missing Fifth Republican.
Let me conclude with a fifth Republican–the one who decided not to be interviewed: Donald Trump. He is the source of all of this discontent, anger, and threatened violence. This kind of behavior does not spontaneously emerge. The Trump campaign, and Trump himself, seeded doubt before the election and stoked the flames of denial and discontent for months. It is why we had an attack on the US Capitol on January 6th. The same anger that lead to death threats against Richer and Hickman and for people like Busch to toss around words like “lynching” and motivated an insurrection.
The source is Trump.
Part of the reason, for example, that Richer received threats is because Trump lied on social media about what Maricopa County officials were doing with the data. Likewise, Trump lied about basic processes, such as the notion that all the voting should be counted by election night. That is, and always has been, impossible.
For example, from official remarks he made on election night in 2020:
Good evening. I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late — we’re looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late.
[…]
As everybody saw, we won by historic numbers. And the pollsters got it knowingly wrong. They got it knowingly wrong. We had polls that were so ridiculous, and everybody knew that at the time. There was no blue wave that they predicted. They thought there was going to be a big blue wave; that was false. That was done for suppression reasons. But instead, there was a big red wave.
These are all lies. But people like Busch believe.
(A book could be filled with Trump’s conscious, public lies on this subject–I will stick just to the ones above because this post has already gotten very long).
None of this will get better if he wins. He will put people with Busch’s mentality (i.e., facts are irrelevant, only what I believe matters) into positions of power. Significant, serious power.
But let me stress: Trump is the source of the denialism. He is the source of the anger. He is doing nothing to squelch it. And, as I have noted, he himself frequently uses violent rhetoric. Leadership and character matter and Trump is leading many of his followers down a dark path and is demonstrating an utter lack of character.
Here are just some examples:
- Radicalizing Rhetoric
- Donald Trump’s Ninety Minutes Hate
- Trump: I Am “The Chosen One”
- Trump and the F-word
- The Politics of Images
- Speaking of Democracy-Eroding Rhetoric
- Violent Rhetoric: Legal But Dangerous
- Trump’s Rhetoric and the GOP’s Test
- Trump Calls Political Rivals “Vermin” and Seeks to “Root Out” the “Threat from Within”
- Trump Salutes Insurrection ‘Hostages’
Look, for example, just in the last week at the lies he is telling about hurricane relief. He is actively cultivating anger and resentment against FEMA and other officials because he thinks it helps him politically.
I would note that the write-up provided above of the interview is adequate, but that the piece for TV has more information and is also more impactful. The video can be found here.
As a bit of a postscript, I also wrote on piece on in 2021, The Arizona Audit that is relevant and the follow-up: BREAKING: Biden Wins AZ. The first piece details a lot of the legal outcomes in the state in advance of what was, to me, a stunt audit aimed at proving all the formal governmental types were wrong. The spoiler for the follow-up is that even the audit proved Biden won. To quote from a NYT piece noted in my post: “In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.”
The evidence that Trump lost is overwhelming, and yet he still insists he won and inflames the passions of many of his supporters in so-doing.
Note that JD Vance would not say who won during the VP debate. And then, later that week, claimed the Trump won.
I know that people will say that all politicians lie, and this is true, if anything, because all humans lie. But there is a profound difference between claiming you will get a certain policy passed if you are elected, knowing that you probably can’t, exaggerating about past accomplishments, or not owning up to a change of policy position and blatantly claiming that reality isn’t real while knowing it is leading to your followers making death threats against innocent local officials.
Trump does not care what effects his words have. Should such a person be President?
And you wish to claim that he just doesn’t know or understand what effects his words are having, then I ask you: should such a person be President?
