So early last week, Knox went to a place that was kinder to his project — about 200 miles south of his home in the Phoenix suburb of Queen Creek, in Cochise County. The oversight board, which has a majority, attempted to hand-count all votes until a judge prevented it, and refused to prove the results until a judge ordered it to do so.

“It’s made the board a little easier to hear,” Knox said ahead of the latest supervisors meeting to discuss replacing a well-respected election commissioner who resigned in opposition to the board’s decision. rice field.

Last year was a tough year for the Arizona election veto movement. The candidates for Senate, Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General all lost. But it’s still thriving in rural Cochise County, and it’s a vivid illustration of how election paranoia fueled by former President Donald Trump remains a stubborn force in rural parts of the country. is an example.

Last year, Mr. Trump parroted his lie that he lost the 2020 presidential election because of voter fraud and backed top candidates in state elections in Arizona and elsewhere. Both of these candidates have lost in the battleground states that usually determine the president. But the electoral conspiracy campaign has been driven by ranch-dotted stretches of the Sonoran Desert, small towns, and red-hot rural areas such as Cochise County, a community on the U.S.-Mexico border that encompasses an area larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. We maintain a strong position in the region.

The county’s well-respected bipartisan election administrator Lisa Mara, who opposed the commission’s vote move, recently resigned after serving five years. Republicans are looking to replace her with elected county registrar David Stevens and another Republican.

Stevens attends Trump’s rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, ahead of the Capitol riots with former Republican Rep. Mark Finchem, who last year ran for Arizona’s top electoral post, Secretary of State. is a friend of Finchem said it would not recognize President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Arizona.

Stevens was poised to oversee the Cochise County handcount when Mara objected last year, but only stopped when a judge ruled that it violated state law. and recently joined a nonprofit founded by Finchem to focus on the “integrity” of elections.

In Arizona, elected record holders like Stevens are already in the election. They register voters, distribute vote-by-mail ballots, and verify signatures on returned ballots, while nonpartisan election officials handle the tally. Stevens said he has always been a fair broker in elections and has spoken more to Democratic groups than Republicans about voting in 2020.

Still, many residents are outraged by Stevens’ new role.

“Stevens’ recorders proved he was part of a crazy cabal,” a number of Stevens voiced against expanding responsibility for overseeing elections in the county. Jennifer Druckman, one of ten retirees, said.

Cochise is staunchly conservative — Trump won the county by 20 percentage points in 2020 despite Biden’s control of the state. But the backlash against electoral chaos is clear.

Activists are circulating a petition to recall supervisor Tom Crosby, one of two Republicans who voted for the hand count in October. Crosby also refused to certify county 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. bottom.

After a judge ordered the Cochise County board to approve the election, Crosby skipped the next meeting, leaving fellow Republican Peggy Judd and Democrat Ann English to vote. It was a dramatic example of how the once mundane task of formalizing election results became politically accountable. That’s because Trump’s allies in scattered rural counties in the West are targeting authentication as a way to sabotage the election.

In an interview after the conference last week, Crosby mocked the speaker’s claim that he represented a threat to democracy.

“The ‘big lie’ is that voting machine checks are subverting democracy,” Crosby said. “My voters feel that if they can’t check, they don’t need it.”

Election officials, including Cochise County, are comparing tallies with paper ballot receipts to check the accuracy of the machines, but Crosby said there is still widespread suspicion. Crosby also dismissed the recall effort.

“Whether the left bashing me or the patriots calling me great, the message is the same,” he said.

But not everyone angry with Crosby is leftist. Greg Lambers, a retired engineer and lifelong Republican, is one of those distributing petitions calling for the removal of the supervisor.

“I don’t think Mr. Crosby is taking any action to give Cochise County a functioning government,” Lambers said in an interview, noting that the county has already spent more than $100,000 in legal fees related to the election adventure. He pointed out that he spends

Lamberth, a former Marine, is also disappointed in Stevens, a former military information technology expert.

“He knows very well that hand counting is less accurate than machine counting,” Lamberth said.

So decades ago election officials mostly turned their backs on hand counting and used tallying tools to tally the results of the vote. Trump and his allies have attacked these devices, made unsubstantiated allegations of manipulation against him in 2020, and hinted that foreign powers such as Venezuela were behind them. The allegations have sparked moves for handcounts in several local counties in Nevada and New Mexico.

Stevens said in an interview that a small group of conservative citizens approached him last October and asked if the county could tally all votes manually rather than relying on machines. Stevens said he told them no — the election was too close to change the procedure.

But Stevens suggested counties conduct handcounts in parallel to check the accuracy of the machines. The judge ruled that the county had no discretion to pursue a full hand count. The county is charming.

Stevens emphasized that this was neither his idea nor that of the supervisor.

“This all comes from the grassroots,” he said in an interview at his office at the courthouse. There, a pockmarked target from the shooting range hung from the wall, and an assembled Lego Star Wars set sat on his coffee table.

Stevens denied some of Arizona’s leading election conspiracy theories, saying most of them were the product of people who didn’t understand the intricacies of the election process, but he saw the value of handcounts. He said he didn’t want to turn it down.

“I try to keep an open mind. Let’s find out,” Stevens said.

Elizabeth Tindall, the county Democratic chairman, said the problem was that Cochise’s Republican power structure simply couldn’t say “no” to its foundations.

“We’ve had Republican leadership almost forever,” Tyndale said. “They don’t hold fellow Republicans accountable for nonsense.”

Despite their overwhelming numerical superiority at the ballot box, many Cochise Republicans see themselves as a wounded minority who need to be more aggressive.

Retired real estate agent Bob McCormick, 82, was a member of the small group who first met Stevens.

Still, as McCormick waited to enter the Overseer’s Conference, he knew there were more angry Democrats than himself who wanted to take their anger out on the Republican Overseer and Stevens.

“For every ten of them, one of us shows up,” McCormick said of the Democrats. ”

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