When Tim Stringham arrived at a “Veterans for Harris” canvassing launch on Sunday in a Phoenix shopping center alongside Sen. Mark Kelly and Rep. Ted Lieu of California, the 35-year-old first-time candidate took a moment to acknowledge the obvious.
“You know that times are strange when the candidate for recorder gets to come up here and speak with a US Senator and a United States congressman,” he told the 30 or so volunteers who had packed into the narrow room for the start of a critical afternoon of knocking on doors.
Stringham, a former JAG attorney, is the Democratic candidate for Maricopa County recorder, an office that’s responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots in a county of more than 4 million people. In a normal year, it’s one of those vital but mostly anonymous jobs, like assessor or auditor, that voters are only aware of—if they’re aware of it at all—from yard signs. But Maricopa’s elections, as Kelly pointed out a few moments later, have not been normal for quite a while. The fight for a few downballot races like Stringham’s will determine the future of the democratic process in a county that in recent years has become ground zero for election denial.
“Before I talk about the presidential election, I want to talk about the county recorders race,” the former astronaut told the canvassers in Phoenix. “The guy we had, Steve Richer, the Republican, did a fantastic job. And nothing against Tim here…but he did a really good job, and we actually owe him a lot. He sort of, like, maybe saved democracy.”
Stephen Richer, as I reported for a recent story and an episode of Reveal, drew national praise for standing up to election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 and 2022 elections, while working to make his county’s voting process more transparent. But he was vilified by members of his party, including the 2022 Republican gubernatorial nominee—and 2024 US Senate nominee—MAGA loyalist Kari Lake, who blamed him for their losses that year. In July, right-wing state representative Justin Heap defeated Richer easily in the primary. While Heap has not outright said that he believes those recent elections were stolen, he welcomed the backing of Lake and other prominent election deniers.
“He lost to a right-wing MAGA sycophant for Donald Trump,” Kelly told the volunteers getting ready to knock on doors. Stringham “has to win—make sure you tell them that it’s really important that they get to that part of the ballot where they vote for Tim. Otherwise, we might have an issue here, once we get to when folks get sworn in for those positions.”
And it’s not just about the recorder race. Not far away, at another canvassing event on Sunday, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs helped get out the vote for Daniel Valenzuela, a former firefighter who is running for the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. The Republican-controlled board, which basically is the county’s governing council, “is in 50 plus lines” of business, Valenzuela explained, from education to public safety. But board members have drawn the ire of the far right for their handling of elections, where they’re responsible for Election Day voting and tabulation. Two Republican supervisors who have drawn the ire of election deniers for certifying the last two elections, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, chose to retire this year. Another, Jack Sellers, was defeated in his primary by an election denier.
“I mean, these are solid supervisors regardless of party, sensible supervisors,” Valenzuela told me. “Two of them decided not to run for re-election, and one of them lost in his primary, and it wasn’t close. And so what is the common thread there?” Now he was running for Gates’ old seat, in part, as a check against the anti-democratic impulses on the right.
With just a few days left until Election Day, Stringham had more or less stopped trying to find and persuade undecided voters and was trying to track down known supporters and Democrats who hadn’t yet voted, to remind them of the importance of picking candidates for every option on the county’s two-page ballot. But reaching crossover voters was a huge part of his campaign—as it has been for every Democrat who’s won elections statewide or in Maricopa County in recent years. And Stringham believes that defending the election process in Maricopa is a winning issue.
“I think the truth is that most Arizonans actually like our election system,” he said. “We get a lot of complaints about things like the mail being slow, or, ‘Why hasn’t my ballot arrived yet?’ There really aren’t a lot of people who say, ‘We want vote by mail to go away.’ That really doesn’t exist.”
His comments were a dig at Heap, who joined Republicans in the legislature in an unsuccessful effort to do just that. One way Stringham can tell his argument resonates? Republicans seemed to be trying to steer away from election denial as a campaign issue in the final stretch.
“Turning Point right now is out there encouraging everybody to vote early,” he said, referring to the political action committee, founded by Charlie Kirk, which is responsible for much of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the state. “They’re doing the same thing we just did—rustling up ballots. So they’re believing in the system, right?”
Stringham believed that the GOP has realized their “election denial strategy has failed, and they’re trying to pivot away from it.” He pointed to their avoidance of any questions about election denial, and how it has been abandoned as a talking point. His opponent is a perfect example of this new dynamic. “He not only voted early, but he literally is sending out text messages that say he’s running to make voting elections boring. He just took Richer’s tagline!” Stringham said. “So they’re sort of just trying to forget the world that happened in the last two, three, four years.”
That is not to say that the election deniers have given up. Lake is still appealing her loss in the 2022 governor’s race—in fact, the state supreme court will take another look at her arguments in the case on November 6. There is no shortage of “Stop the Steal” candidates on the ballot, and Republicans are laying the groundwork to contest the results across the country should Trump fall short once again. But Stringham was on to something. For now, at least, Republican leaders are trying to get their voters to trust the process, not reject it.
At a Trump rally on Saturday in Scottsdale, Charlie Kirk leaned into the message that Republicans control their own destiny. All they had to do was “chase” the 400,000 Republican ballots that had not yet been turned in. At one point, he asked people in the crowd to take a look at the small, hangar-like space in which he was speaking. “This seating section right here has about 280 people,” he said. “Our Attorney General in this state became Attorney General by 280 votes. And there were 200,000 Republicans that got ballots that did not submit them in the midterm election.”
“We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”
The Democratic AG, Kris Mayes, drew boos from the crowd when Kirk mentioned her recent announcement that she was instructing her criminal division to investigate Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney. “She’s trying to investigate the speech of Donald Trump, but you know what? That’s our fault, not her fault, because we didn’t turn out the vote,” he said. “We easily could have found 300 more votes. We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”
There was the usual chatter about making the election, as Donald Trump Jr. put it, “too big to rig.” But on an individual level, the voters I spoke with felt encouraged by their experiences with the system. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that almost everyone had voted by mail, something Republicans like Kirk have been pushing hard since 2022—in contrast to Trump’s past assertions that it was just a way for Democrats to steal elections. Some of them said they were encouraged by the text alerts they’d received from the county recorder’s office, which, per the county, updates voters when their ballot has been “prepared, mailed, received, verified and counted.” An added benefit to voting early is those voters were spared the sorts of Election Day annoyances—like overheating printers or long lines—that Republicans in the past have cited as proof of a plot against them.
Then again, there may be a simpler reason to explain this sudden sunniness about the process: Most recent polls show Donald Trump ahead in the state. If those results hold, no one will need to conjure conspiracy theories to explain the results—they’ll happily accept them.
