GOP Arizona Elections Official Calls Trump 'Unhinged' for His Repeated 'Insane Lies' About Election

Virginia Chamlee
·4 min read

MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty; Richer for Recorder Donald Trump (left), Stephen Richer

The Republican head of a county elections office in Arizona — a state currently in the midst of a partisan recount of the 2020 presidential election — called former President Donald Trump "unhinged" over the weekend over his repeated false claims about the vote.

In response to Trump's incorrect assertion that the entire voter database of Maricopa County had been "deleted" in the midst of the recount, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer responded on his personal Twitter account Saturday.

"Wow. This is unhinged. I'm literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now," Richer wrote. "We can't indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5. If we don't call this out…"

The audit underway in Maricopa County came in the wake of Trump's surprising loss to Joe Biden in both the county and in Arizona overall.

Republicans in the state's Senate have since commissioned the audit to investigate the claims of "fraud" by the former president and his supporters, who have provided no evidence that any took place, but have insisted that they couldn't have lost.

The state has undergone two previous audits of its 2020 election results, neither of which found any issues of concern. Both audits confirmed that Biden had won.

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Richer isn't the only Arizona Republican to speak out against the state's recount.

On Thursday, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors issued a statement in which he blasted the private contractor hired to reexamine the election results, saying they "are in way over their heads."

"The contractors hired by the Senate President are not auditors and they are not certified by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission ... This is not funny; this is dangerous," Chairman Jack Sellers wrote in the statement, adding that the claims that files had been deleted from the county server were "not true."

"I know you have all grown weary of the lies and half-truths six months after the 2020 General Election," Sellers added.

Speaking to the New York Times last week, Arizona state Sen. Paul Boyer — who initially voted in favor of the audit — now calls it "ridiculous."

"It makes us look like idiots," Boyer told the Times. "Looking back, I didn't think it would be this ridiculous. It's embarrassing to be a state senator at this point."

RELATED: Who Is Elise Stefanik, Liz Cheney's Replacement as the No. 3 House Republican

Despite Trump's electoral college and popular vote losses, his incitement of an attempted coup on the U.S. Capitol right before leaving office, and the fact that none of his lies about the election have held up in court, Republican party leadership has largely refrained from going against the former president.

Instead, the party has worked to remove those who have spoken out against Trump, such as Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who last Wednesday was voted out of her position in Republican leadership following her vote to impeach Trump after the riots.

Speaking with reporters immediately after her ouster as the House of Representatives' No. 3 Republican, Cheney told reporters her party "must go forward based on truth, we cannot both embrace the 'big lie' [about the election] and embrace the Constitution ... The nation needs a strong Republican Party, the nation needs a party that is based upon fundamental principles of conservatism. And I am committed and dedicated to ensuring that that's how this party goes forward and I plan to lead the fight to do that."

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