Kari Lake knew exactly who stole the election from her. Two months after the 2022 gubernatorial election was called for her Democratic rival, Katie Hobbs, the self-proclaimed rightful governor of Arizona took to the stage for a rally at the Orange Tree Golf Club in Scottsdale where a photo was projected behind her showing two election officials: Stephen Richer and Bill Gates. “These guys,” she said, pointing to the screen.
The crowd cheered, “Lock them up! Lock them up!”
Lake went on to allege repeatedly that Richer and Gates, both lifelong Republicans, sabotaged her candidacy by injecting 300,000 bogus early votes into Maricopa County where they administered the election and misprinting Election Day ballots. “The incredible lengths that these two bozos went to trample and steal our vote,” said Lake. “Well these guys are really, really terrible at running elections, but I found out they’re really good at lying.”
Just over a year later though, Lake declined to defend those statements in a defamation lawsuit brought by Richer, admitting that none of them were true, or as her attorney recently told the judge in the case, “We did admit everything, as far as the facts.” As for herself, Lake claimed she defaulted for the greater good. “By participating in this lawsuit, it would only serve to legitimize this perversion of our legal system and allow bad actors to interfere in our upcoming election,” she said in a video posted online. “So I won’t be taking part.”
“Stop,” said Richer with a resigned laugh prior to her default. “Just, just stop.”
Though Lake effectively conceded, the case is not over. A jury will later determine how much she owes Richer in terms of damages — he is seeking millions — as well as the removal of Lake’s defamatory social-media posts. If other recent high-profile defamation cases are any indication — such as the one against Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay two Georgia election workers $148 million — the price will not be cheap. With $2.5 million in her campaign’s bank account, a hefty judgment could harm her candidacy for a highly competitive seat that could determine who controls the Senate. But Richer has already won something that’s hard to put a price on: forcing one of the last leading election deniers in the country to go under oath, only to surrender.
“I refuse to sort of cede the Republican Party to crackpots and conspiracy theorists,” he said.
A lifelong libertarian — he wore a black armband around college for a week after Milton Friedman died — Richer voted for an independent for president in 2016 but liked what Donald Trump did in his first term, slashing the corporate tax and installing conservatives on the Supreme Court, and supported him for a second. At the same time, Richer got more involved with the Arizona GOP. In 2019, he volunteered to write a preliminary audit of how Adrian Fontes, the first Democratic recorder in Maricopa County in 50 years, administered the 2018 election. Democrats won a slate of important seats and some Republicans accused Fontes of foul play. Richer aired unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, such as harvesting ballots from the trash. While these would be left out of the final report, his critics say his just-asking-questions approach contributed to growing election denialism in Arizona. “He helped create this monster and the monster is now chasing after him,” said Steve Slugocki, a senior adviser to Fontes, who is now secretary of State.
“To think that I was egging Alex Jones and Donald Trump on — I mean, give me a break,” Richer shot back. “That’s ridiculous.”
Not long after he finished the audit, Richer decided to run against Fontes with a Trumpy slogan: “make the Recorder’s Office boring again,” promising “fair and competent elections,” and beat Fontes by fewer than 5,000 votes. As soon as Fox News called Arizona for Biden, Alex Jones and armed protesters showed up outside the center where votes from across the county were being tabulated. Trump and his allies waged a massive pressure campaign on the Board of Supervisors to change the election results and filed a barrage of lawsuits against Maricopa County (all of which were dismissed or dropped). Staffers didn’t know what to expect from their new boss coming from a party gripped by denialism. “He was perceived as possibly gonna come in with an agenda,” said Rey Valenzuela, a 33-year veteran of the office and the current elections director. “There was a lot of fear and trepidation. ‘Are we gonna be told to not count ballots?’”
On Richer’s third day on the job, rioters sacked the Capitol in Washington and he sent his staff home as protesters also gathered outside. Days later, the Arizona senate subpoenaed Richer, demanding access to the county’s voting materials. In March, Stop the Steal activists accused the office of shredding ballots and throwing them in the trash, which conspiracy theorists alleged were then fed to incinerated chickens. By April, Republican lawmakers hired a tech company called the Cyber Ninjas, founded by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, to do a full hand recount of the county’s 2.1 million ballots — a buffoonish effort that once again affirmed Biden’s victory and even increased his margin by 360 votes.
Despite the political pressure and criticism Richer had leveled at the prior Democratic administration, he immediately deferred to the staff. “He came in and said, ‘You guys are the experts. I want to know the facts. I want to be caught up and trained up,’” said Valenzuela. “He proved me wrong.” As soon as he entered the office, Richer embedded himself in the process, throwing back his tie to grab a seat at a terminal in the signature verification room or staying out late to unload ballots from trucks. At first, Richer stayed out of the public eye. That changed in May once Republicans started accusing his office of criminal conduct. He became a vocal critic of the Cyber Ninjas audit, and a defender of the 2020 election, which his former opponent had administered. When Trump alleged that, “The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!,” Richer tweeted, “Wow. This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now.”
Richer faced a ferocious backlash, later testifying to death threats and, at least once, throngs of people banging their fists and shoes on his car windshield. At one point, verbal threats prompted law enforcement to remove his wife from work. His peers got it, too. Bill Gates, a member of the Board of Supervisors, and his family had to go into hiding. Election-related harassment has driven some officials to not seek re-election, including Gates, and a mass exodus of local administrators from their posts.
“This guy could’ve just ducked and covered and said, ‘I’m new here,’” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of the Georgia secretary of State who testified with Brad Raffensperger at the January 6 hearings about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in their state. “He could’ve bought in and would’ve been lionized by that crowd.”
While Richer was trying to put out the fire of election denial throughout 2021, another political novice began stoking it: Kari Lake. The former news anchor ran for governor and earned Trump’s endorsement for the Republican nomination largely by cheerleading his claim that Democrats stole Arizona in 2020. She called for the election to be decertified (which is legally impossible) and for Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of State at the time, to be imprisoned. As the 2022 primary race got tight in July, Lake baselessly claimed that, “We’re already detecting some stealing going on.” After she won though, she claimed, “We out-voted the fraud.” A month before the midterms, Lake refused to say whether she would accept the outcome if she lost.
On the morning of the 2022 election, some printers in Maricopa County were producing ballots that were too light for on-site tabulators to read, causing long lines and frustration — a technical glitch that reignited claims of fraud. On Truth Social, Trump wrote, “Here we go again? The people will not stand for it!!!” Lake issued a “voter alert” on Twitter and baselessly suggested Republican areas were being targeted.
Paul Penzone, then the county sheriff, was with Richer at the tabulation center when he disappeared to the backroom. He found Richer alone with his head between his hands and gave him a pep talk. “‘There are a lot of people out there volunteering to process this, and they need to see their leader,’” he recalled telling Richer. “‘You gotta buck up big fella and show ’em what you’re made of.’”
“The dude just popped up, took a big breath, put his head up, and led everyone through it,” said Penzone.
Election officials adjusted the printer settings to make new ballots legible. Otherwise, voters could place their ballot in a secure box to be tabulated off-site later or go to another poll center. When Republicans filed an emergency lawsuit to extend polling hours, a judge rejected it, saying they didn’t provide any evidence that voters had been disenfranchised. In the end, only 7 percent of votes cast in person were affected. Weeks later, the election was certified and Hobbs beat Lake in the county by just over 17,000 votes.
That did not stop Lake. While election deniers were wiped out in the election, Lake doubled down and refused to concede, raising $2.5 million to overturn her race. In December 2022, she sued Maricopa County officials, including Richer, alleging that the printers that had malfunctioned were the result of intentional misconduct, which a court rejected for lack of evidence. Nonetheless, she continued her crusade, appealing her case and honing in on Richer at the January rally and in the months to follow. In an interview on Mike Lindell’s podcast, she said‚ “It’s about all voters being disenfranchised intentionally [sic] these monsters who run our election at Maricopa County; two men by the name of Stephen Richer and Bill Gates … and they’re in charge of the election.”
The death threats came swiftly.
“Someone needs to get these people AND their children,” wrote one Texas man on social media. “The children are the most important message to send.” He was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for calling for a mass shooting of poll workers. About two weeks later, Richer received a voicemail from a California man. “Run, motherfucker,” he said. “You wanna cheat our elections? You wanna screw Americans out of true votes? We’re coming, motherfucker. You’d better fucking hide.” He was arrested in February.
To top it off, Lake published a book last summer in which she recounts a dream she supposedly had where “Lanky Stephen” kidnapped her and tried to kill her in the desert. “He looked like Ron Howard amidst a mid-life crisis,” she wrote.
“I often said of Karl Marx, it’s a good thing he wasn’t a better writer,” said Richer. “I would say the same thing here.”
Today, the Maricopa County tabulation center looks like Fort Knox. It is surrounded by a tall permanent wrought-iron fence. Entries are equipped with badge access and metal detectors.
Once open to the public, it’s now available by appointment only. Richer hopes to still be running this center come November. In July, he’ll face off with Justin Heap in the Republican primary, a Lake-backed Freedom Caucus Republican in Congress who won’t say where he stands on the 2020 election. Richer once expressed interest in running for Senate at some point, but for the time being, he’s taking it “day by day,” he said. “I’m just trying to see what the political world looks like year by year and to see if there’s a place for me.”
