Nick Riccardi AP dispatch from Cochise County:
Trump last year backed a slate of candidates for top state election positions in Arizona and elsewhere who parroted his lie about losing the 2020 presidential election due to voter fraud. Every one of those candidates lost in the battleground states that typically decide the presidency. But the election conspiracy movement maintains a firm hold in beet-red rural spots such as Cochise County, a swath of the Sonoran Desert dotted with ranches, small towns and U.S.-Mexico border communities that encompasses an area larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.
The county’s respected, nonpartisan elections director, Lisa Marra, who had opposed the board’s voting moves, recently resigned after five years in the job. The two Republicans on the three-member board are seeking to replace her with the elected county recorder, David Stevens, another Republican.
Stevens is a friend of former GOP state Rep. Mark Finchem, who attended Trump’s rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the Capitol riot and who ran unsuccessfully last year for secretary of state, Arizona’s top election post. Finchem had said he would not have certified President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona.
Stevens was prepared to oversee Cochise County’s hand count when Marra objected last year, and only stopped once a judge ruled that it violated state law. Stevens has appealed that ruling and recently joined a nonprofit founded by Finchem to focus on election “integrity.”
In Arizona, elected recorders such as Stevens already play a part in elections. They register voters, distribute mail ballots and verify signatures on the ones sent back, while the nonpartisan election director handles the counting. Stevens said he has always been a fair broker in elections and that in 2020, he spoke more to Democratic groups about voting than Republican ones.
Still, many residents are furious at Stevens’ new role.
“Recorder Stevens has proven he’s part of the crazy conspiracy crowd,” said Jennifer Druckman, a retiree who was one of dozens who spoke out against Stevens getting expanded responsibilities to oversee elections in the county.
Cochise is staunchly conservative — Trump won the county by 20 percentage points in 2020 even as Biden took the state. But the backlash to the election chaos has been palpable.
Activists are circulating petitions to recall Supervisor Tom Crosby, one of the two Republicans who voted for the hand count in October. Crosby also refused to certify the county’s vote tallies as a way to stop the state from finalizing election results in December after Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake for governor.
After a judge ordered the Cochise County board to certify the election, Crosby skipped the next meeting, leaving fellow Republican Peggy Judd and Democrat Ann English to take the vote. It was a dramatic example of how the once-routine task of formalizing election results became charged with politics as Trump allies in scattered rural counties in the West targeted certification as a way to disrupt elections.