Concern about Arizona political violence as election nears

 If you’re worried about the possibility of political violence erupting around this year’s presidential election, you’re not alone.

Seven out of 10 voters are worried about the potential for political violence before or after the election, according to an online survey of 900 Arizona voters conducted in May on behalf of the Arizona Democracy Resilience Network, a statewide group dedicated to working for “secure, fair and safe elections.”

With support from the Carter Center, the group formed in 2021 with a focus on safeguarding elections, debunking false election rumors, reducing the likelihood of political violence and rebuilding trust in the electoral process. To that end, they are working with local officials who can rebut false stories and attorneys who will be prepared to fight election-related claims in court. (Similar groups have been formed in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin.)

Ron Barber, a Democrat who represented Southern Arizona in Congress from 2012 to 2015, said the group came together because of “the politics that people were seeing in this country.”

“When the (Jan. 6) insurrection took place, it gave even more reinforcement to the need for an organization like ours, because what we’re working on is how to restore trust and credibility about the election processes, which have been seriously damaged by the rhetoric, particularly out of the Trump campaign and his associates,” Barber said.

Barber is co-chair of the group alongside Don Henninger, a Republican and former editor at the Arizona Republic.

Henninger said he got involved because it seemed similar to the work he did over the course of a 35-year career in the newspaper business.

“Given what’s at stake, and that’s essentially the future of our democracy, how could I say no?” Henninger said.

The ADRC stands for three fundamental principles: Committing to truth in politics, engaging peacefully with fellow citizens and supporting electoral democracy.

Barber said the May survey, which had a margin of error of +/- 3.72 percent, had good news. Most of those surveyed said they did not themselves subscribe to political violence, with 83 percent saying they didn’t think anything could happen in an election that would justify a violent response.

ADRN’s survey showed that the majority of surveyed voters – 74 percent – are confident that the state “can administer a fair election where everyone has the opportunity to vote and the votes are counted accurately.” Among that group, 36 percent are very confident.

But 26 percent of surveyed voters said they were totally not confident in the state’s ability to conduct a fair election, with about one in 10 saying they were “not at all confident.”

Restoring trust among the one in four voters who don’t trust elections is a challenge, especially as politicians such as GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and U.S. Senate hopeful and failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake continue to complain that their losses in Arizona are the result of rigged elections.

The theories, which spread quickly on social media, are legion: Maricopa County rigged the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden. Fake ballots were secretly added into the count by crooked election officials. Unscrupulous political operatives stole tens of thousands of early ballots and filled them out with votes for Democratic candidates. Ballots were taken to the farm of a Maricopa County supervisor and then fed to his chickens, which he later set ablaze to destroy all evidence. Chinese bamboo ballots were snuck into the system. Undocumented immigrants cast ballots for Democrats. Election officials purposely set printers up to fail at voting centers.

None of these claims – alongside many others – have held up in court, but that didn’t stop the Arizona Senate from commissioning the Cyber Ninja audit of the 2020 election, a slipshod volunteer operation that ultimately showed that Biden did get more votes than Trump in Arizona. Or from having a 2023 hearing on “election integrity” that included comments from one witness who claimed that leadership at the highest level on both sides of the political aisle had been co-opted by Mexican drug cartels and the Mormon Church. (In that case, Rep. Liz Harris, the Chandler lawmaker who invited the witness and subsequently lied to the House Ethics Committee about her awareness of the nature of her testimony was expelled from the House of Representatives by her colleagues.)

Henninger expressed concern about rhetoric coming from Lake, who suggested earlier this year that supporters might want to “strap on a Glock” during a campaign stop in Mohave County.

“People take that literally,” Henninger said. “And then you have the No. 2 person in the Maricopa County Republican Party, a couple of weeks ago, saying that if (Maricopa) County Recorder Stephen Richer walked into the room, they would lynch him. And they get away with this stuff. Nobody holds them accountable for what they’re saying there. So if nobody is going to stand up against that, that’s why we have the Arizona Democracy Resilience Network. To say this is not acceptable, and try to set some kind of standards for what our values are.”

Those kinds of threats have resulted in many election officials quitting.

“We’ve lost a lot of seasoned election officials,” Barber said. “In the last year and a half, since the election of ’22 we have lost election officials in 12 out of 15 counties, and that includes sometimes both election workers, the election director and the county recorder. And so that’s been a significant loss of institutional knowledge and experience.”

Another concern is the reluctance of some county officials to vote to certify the election canvas. Mohave County officials backed down from a plan to not certify the 2022 election after they were threatened with legal action; in Cochise County, two GOP supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, refused to certify the county’s election results. Judd eventually reversed herself in the face of a judge’s order, while Crosby skipped the meeting where the certification took place.

Both Crosby and Judd were later indicted by state grand jury on felony charges of interference with an election officer and conspiracy, with Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes saying that “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy are unacceptable. (Mayes has also indicted the so-called “fake electors” who claimed in legal documents to be the true representatives of Arizona’s 2020 electoral votes.)

In Pima County, Republican Supervisor Steve Christy refused to certify the 2020 and 2022 general election canvasses, although he did vote to certify this year’s July primary.

Christy said he voted against certification because of anecdotal stories he heard from Pima County constituents, as well as his concern about voting irregularities in other communities.

“There were enough irregularities in the whole system, coast to coast, in various states,” Christy said. For example, he said, he heard stories about voters using Sharpies would cause a bleeding of ink to the reverse side of the ballot and invalidate votes.

“There were a lot of questions and a lot of irregularities and I felt incumbent to question those things and I didn’t feel comfortable approving a canvas with all of these issues out there,” Christy said. “So all those things brought together led me to believe this was not a forthcoming election process and it needed to be analyzed and looked into before we approved the canvass.”

Barber said that Christy “knows better.”

“He knows that the election system in Pima County is very well protected and very trustworthy, and yet he votes to not certify with no basis,” Barber said. If Christy had a problem with how elections were run elsewhere, Barber said, “it’s not about that, even if that were true. It’s about, ‘What’s the Pima County situation?’ Do you distrust the Pima County situation or voting outcome? You can’t really say you don’t support it or believe in it, and yet, he does.”

Henninger said those kinds of actions – coordinated or not – contribute to the loss of trust in elections, which is difficult to regain after it’s been lost.

“Trust is something we’ve taken for granted in our election systems all of our history,” Henninger said. “Now we’ve got prominent people, former presidents, sowing doubts about it, getting followers to listen to them, and it sets us back. So now we’re going to have to build back that trust, though it probably won’t happen overnight. It will probably take a few election cycles.”

He added that “it’s inherent on people to understand the difference between facts and fiction, and you’ve got to pay attention in this day and age, with all the various media sources out there, social media and so forth. AI now is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. I mean, when you have Donald Trump on the debate talking about people in Springfield, Ohio, eating kittens and dogs, and there’s people who believe that, we’ve got to get back to the point where we need people to understand what the facts are.”

Henninger said he wasn’t too worried about political violence ahead of the election, although he says “we don’t know what we don’t know.” But he does worry about what might happen afterwards. He said Maricopa County will have a two-page ballot this year and that could result in issues regarding tabulation.

“There’s going to be some mistakes, there’s going to be some hiccups. Are people going to use the human error mistakes that are likely to occur when the ballot is challenging to start stewing conspiracy theories and drum up people to think about doing violence?” Henninger said. “Yeah, I worry about that for sure.”