David Lara speaks at the Republican National Convention on July 17.J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The news got a bit buried, with so much going on in national politics, but Tuesday was a bad night for Republicans who have stood up to election-deniers in their party.
In Maricopa County, the largest and swingiest county in America’s largest swing state, Republican primary voters ousted Stephen Richer, an incumbent who had made a national name for himself by standing up to Trump allies such as Kari Lake over the last three years. The man who defeated Richer, state Rep. Justin Heap, never outright disputed the legitimacy of previous elections, but his supporters sure have—he was recruited to run by a now-indicted fake elector, touted the endorsement of two congressmen who pushed for the state’s 2020 election results to be rejected, and was backed by Lake, who falsely accused the incumbent of adding “300,000 illegal ballots” to the tally in her 2022 run for governor. Republican voters also ousted a member of the board of supervisors (which is responsible for election day voting and ballot tabulation) who had, like his colleagues, drawn the ire of the Trump orbit for doing his job.
It was not just Richer or Maricopa, though. In Yuma County, on the border with Mexico and California, another Republican election official, Richard Colwell, is on the verge of losing his race to a conservative activist named David Lara who has spread conspiracies about elections. Per Bolts’ Alex Burness:
Lara has often lied about elections in Arizona, saying election fraud has taken place for “many years, wide open.” He has also floated punishing that fraud with the death penalty. His complaints helped inspire parts of the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which is popular on the right for alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the movie drew from a purported investigation that Lara conducted alongside another county resident into election tampering.
Earlier this year, 2,000 Mules was pulled from circulation by the conservative Salem Media Group after the distributor settled a lawsuit from a Georgia man the film had falsely accused of voter fraud. Despite claims of a massive, illegal ballot-harvesting operation, the biggest case to arise from the “scandal” Lara helped blow open was the conviction of a former mayor who had collected four ballots from her neighbors in the town of San Luis, where Lara is from. Lara, who leads Colwell by 77 votes with a few thousand early ballots left to count, told the New York Times that he was planning to monitor his town’s ballot drop box location ahead of the 2022 election but didn’t “want to tip off the enemy” about his plans for doing so. In an interview with my colleagues at Reveal that year, Lara alleged that he had lost previous elections due to massive voter fraud.
The county leans Republican but not overwhelmingly so; 2022 Senate candidate Blake Masters pulled just 51 percent of the vote there. Unlike Maricopa, where Democrats fielded a credible candidate, former JAG lawyer Tim Stringham, for just such a contingency, Yuma Democrats had no candidates on the ballot in the primary. According to Bolts, they are hoping a write-in candidate will win enough votes to qualify for the nomination.
Lara also spoke at last month’s Republican National Convention, where he was featured as an “everyday American” concerned about border security. In a sign of just how under-the-radar this race was, neither the Trump campaign’s biography, nor the speech itself, nor the Arizona Republic’s write-up of his speech made note of the critical election office that he was currently seeking.
