Stephen Richer is a key election official in Arizona. He is the “recorder” of Maricopa County (whose seat is Phoenix). Elected in 2020, he ran again this year and, yesterday, lost in the Republican primary. (For a news story about this, go here.) The result is not much of a surprise. Richer has refused to claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. He has violated a Republican tenet, so to speak — and therefore paid the price.
I podcasted with Richer, and wrote about him, last April. Here is a portion of my article:
He is a Republican out of Central Casting, in the pre-Trump era. The ISI honors program. NRI’s “Burke to Buckley.” The Federalist Society. AEI. On and on. In 2008, he volunteered on Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.
This is notable, in light of Giuliani’s later career as an election-denier and a whipper-up of violence.
Yes.
After the 2020 presidential election, Giuliani, Alex Jones, and others came to town, peddling conspiracy theories and riling up the folks. Richer was sworn in as recorder on January 4. Two days later, he had to send his staff home, because people outside their facility were threatening violence.
His second week on the job, Richer had to have a police escort. He needed protection not from BLM or Antifa — but from Republicans. People who regard themselves as “conservative.” This struck Richer as “surreal,” and it still does.
Aren’t we supposed to stand for law and order?
Some more:
In May 2021, Donald Trump, the former president and the leader of the Republican Party, accused Richer of deleting files. Trump totally made this up, of course. A lie, one of his firehose of lies. A man from Missouri called Richer, threatening to kill him. Sometime later, the FBI arrested the man.
So far, four people have been arrested for threatening Richer. He soldiers on, however — to me, an act of patriotic courage.
At the end of my article, I wrote,
If Richer wanted nothing more to do with politics, I wouldn’t blame him. He says that he entered politics brimming with ideas: conservative ideas, about how to make life better. He still has those ideas. But the competition today, he says, is between a basic respect for our democracy and the opposite. He offers himself as “somebody who will say that two plus two is four, even if my party doesn’t want it to be four.”
Without the likes of Stephen Richer, our democracy would collapse. I admire him no end. I hope that he flourishes, in Republican politics or wherever he chooses to be.
There is a phrase from the movies: “You can’t handle the truth.” Many, many cannot. This accounts for Richer’s loss in the primary, I think.
More than ever, I understand the “guardrails” of our democracy to be human — to be flesh and blood — rather than arrangements on paper. Men can laugh at paper, or burn it. We need the Stephen Richers in positions of authority. Otherwise, we are cooked.
I think of the Georgians, Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling. They, too, are Republicans who stayed true to the law. On Thanksgiving Day, in the White House, President Trump said of Raffensperger, “He’s an enemy of the people.” Raffensperger and his wife were the targets of death and rape threats. They had to have 24-hour security. Raffensperger was censured by the Georgia Republican Party.
I also think of Richer’s fellow Arizonan, Rusty Bowers, a classic conservative Republican. As speaker of the house in his state, he refused to falsify the election. Then came the death threats and other abuse. He lost his political career — but his honor is intact.
We refer to officeholders as “the Honorable.” How many of them are?
Richer, Raffensperger, Bowers, Sterling — I hope that names such as these have places of honor in the GOP, and in America at large, when Trump and Trumpism have passed. All of us owe these guys a lot.