The implications of Trump loyalists and election deniers winning GOP primaries

[00:00:00]in Arizona yesterday, 3 prominent election deniers won their Republican primaries. Former Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General.

[00:00:09]If they win in November, they will play key roles in overseeing elections and defending voting laws. Arizona is one of many states where candidates who denied or questioned the 2020 election results are on the ballot.

[00:00:21]For more on this, we're joined by Steven Richard. He was the Republican election's recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona from 2021 to 2025.

[00:00:29]He's now a senior fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

[00:00:32]Stephen, welcome back to the News Hour. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, and we're still talking about the same things, it seems. Here we are. Well, listen, 3 election deniers in Arizona last night all played a role in the efforts to try to overturn those 2020 election results. That was the one in which President Trump lost the election.

[00:00:51]They all won their primaries last night. What do you take away from that? What does that say to you? Yeah, these weren't just people who casually believed that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, or at least mention it in passing. These were people who were integral to January 6th, as Andy Biggs was, who filed the Krakeken lawsuit in the state of Arizona, as Alex Colden did, and who oversaw the cyber ninja's audit in 2021 as Warren Petersen, the AG candidate, did. So these are leaders in the movement, and it's reflective of the fact that the Arizona primary, Republican primary base is still in the raptures of election denialism, and it's still a requirement here to win in a primary. So primaries are one thing, the general is another. When you look back at election deniers and how they fared in past elections. In 2022 and 2024, they almost universally lost in those general election races. Do you have any reason to believe that 2026 is going to be different. I think those people would say look at President Trump in 2024. He overcame, obviously he was the election denier in chief, and he won Arizona in 2024. And so they would say we're now so much better than the Democrats on the issues that even if not everyone loves this, then we're gonna win in 2026.

[00:02:14]I still think it's a net negative for them, and that played out in 2022, certainly, and it played out to an extent in 2024. We know that this kind of rhetoric though, repeating the lies about the 2020 election. It has real world implications. So if there are more people or even a consistent number of people who continue to believe that.

[00:02:36]How does that impact our election security, how people choose to participate in it or what they tolerate at election sites. It's so easy to dismiss this as simply a political game. Oh well, politicians lie, you know, they all say, but this has real world downstream effects.

[00:02:52]The very least of which is that a lot of people won't have confidence in our elections, and that at the minimum is simply sad, but more importantly, it means that there will be confrontations at voting locations. It means that it will be harder to recruit polling workers or the worst is that it will translate into threats of violence or actual violence. In Maricopa County, we had to invest millions of dollars into security over the last few years and during the 2024 cycle because of all of the nonsense that flowed out from these election deniers. While I have you, Stephen, I want to ask you about some news we reported this week out of New Jersey, where Governor Mikey Sherrill announced yesterday that more than 6000 people had been accidentally registered to vote in New Jersey despite declaring to the DMV that they were not citizens, about 400 of them actually ended up voting. President Trump has been talking about this. He posted that news this morning and called it evidence of what he called a crooked election system. How do you look at this from your perspective?

[00:03:58]It's not good, but let's be honest about what it is, is it is a software glitch. It is not a bunch of non-citizens who are trying to unlawfully circumvent the controls of the process. In fact, those people all said that they were not citizens, and yet the software moved them over into the citizenship category. And so I don't think it fits into what President Trump is currently saying. However, it is disappointing and it's even more disappointing that according to the governor, this was simply buried for 2 years and we're only hearing about it now. And so I hope that the governor produces more information about how they discovered this, what was previously done and what's going to be done moving forward to make sure that we continue to keep non-citizens voting in our elections to a very, very, very, very small number.

[00:04:50]Just to back this up a little bit, I want to remind people here, you know what it was like to have to stand up to pressure from the president and others as an election official back in 2020, it took individual people refusing to give in to political pressure to try to change or overturn election results. When you look at the system and where it is now, are you confident those individual people will be in those positions to stand up to pressure if it's there in 2026 or 2028. You know, 10 years ago, I would have hoped that most people had a line in the sand and that the well-being of American democracy was a line in the sand for any politician. I think it's this distinct minority, and I think those people who raise their head, who held that line in the sand in 2020 and 2022, and in 2024, fewer and fewer of them, at least on my side, on the Republican side, are in office, and that's just, it's a real shame and it could potentially have some negative consequences. Steven Richard, now at Harvard University's Kennedy School. Always good to have you in your perspective. Thank you so much. Thank you.