Some of the folks who’ve been telling us we can’t trust the results of our election system just won their primary races… so naturally, they’re challenging the results, right?
Of course not! Especially if one of them happens to be the most obnoxious, adamant election-denier in Arizona.
Former Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem – who still uses the hashtag #TrumpWon on social media almost four years after #TrumpLost – beat Ken Bennett in the Republican Arizona Senate primary in Prescott’s uber-red Legislative District 1.
Yes, that Ken Bennett. The one who was president of the Arizona Senate and later held our second-highest office, Secretary of State. He’s the Republican who more than doubled the votes of his Democratic opponent in the last State Senate election, representing Prescott, where he started his career as a city councilman in 1985. Yes, that very same Bennett was beaten by Finchem, who moved to Yavapai County so recently, I’ll bet he still has unpacked boxes.
The “R” next to Finchem’s name means he’ll win the general election and will return to the state legislature. And even though he had to carpetbag a couple hundred miles from Pima to Yavapai County to do it, it’ll be a relief to me when he wins – a relief for my ears to not hear his complaints anymore. After all, he didn’t drop the legal challenges to his SecState loss until almost 10 months after Election Day, when he lost to Adrian Fuentes by a rather significant margin: 120,000 votes.
What remains to be seen, though, is whether we’ll end up with an even bigger mess of election conspiracies being sewn by the very person responsible for a large part of the election process in Maricopa County. Will someone who doesn’t trust the system be in charge of it?
There was a time when nobody cared about the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. That is, until that job was thrust into the spotlight by the 2020 presidential election and the infamous state-senate-ordered audit of the county’s ballots. Suddenly, that office rose from the level of dog catcher to kingmaker.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, the embattled Republican who pushed back against Republican-driven election conspiracy theories, lost his July primary race to former Arizona Representative Justin Heap.
While Heap has not publicly said that he thinks the 2020 or 2022 elections were stolen from Republican candidates like Donald Trump, Kari Lake and (gag me with a hanging chad) Finchem, his comments in committee meetings and his voting record in the state legislature certainly suggest he does. Heap voted in favor of bills that would ban electronic tabulation of ballots and force hand counts, eliminate most early voting in Arizona, and replace voting centers with small neighborhood precincts capped at 1,000 registered voters each. The kind of stuff election-deniers dream about when their heads hit the pillow.
If Heap defeats Democrat Tim Stringham, a former McCain Republican who served in both the Army and Navy, will he fire everybody in the office the day he gets in?
And will he contest his own election?
