The National Weather Service has issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Maricopa County starting at 3:01 p.m. Sept. 27. The warning expires at 3:45 p.m. Sept. 27.
“The National Weather Service in Phoenix has issued a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for, Maricopa County in south central Arizona, Until 3:45 p.m. MST. At 3:01 p.m. MST, a severe thunderstorm was located 7 miles north of Cotton Center, or 16 miles southwest of Goodyear, moving north at 15 mph.
HAZARD: Quarter-size hail.
SOURCE: Radar indicated.
IMPACT: Damage to vehicles is expected. Locations impacted include: Buckeye, Palo Verde, Painted Rock Dam, Perryville, Hassayampa, and Arlington. This includes the following highways: Interstate 10 between mile markers 112 and 120; State Route 85 between mile markers 132 and 154.
Pay attention to the weather. If you see big blue clouds, otherwise known as thunderheads, go inside. These types of clouds could mean a thunderstorm is coming.
Get in a building with plumbing and wiring. If lightning strikes the building, the lightning will be conducted around and into the ground.
Stay in your car. A vehicle will give you protection as electricity from lightning will pass through the vehicle’s structure instead of hitting you.
Get off open water. A boat out on the water is likely to be the most prominent object and you could be struck.
Do not shower or bathe. If lightning hits your pipes, it could be conducted into the water in your bath or shower.
Do not use electric appliances with plugs or cords. Wireless cellphones are OK, as are laptops that are connected to Wi-Fi but not plugged in.
Follow the 30-30 rule. If you hear thunder within 30 seconds of a lightning bolt, that means the thunderstorm’s distance is threatening. Wait at least 30 minutes after you hear the last thunder to go out. That gives the storm enough time to move away or dissipate.
You don’t have to be near a storm to get struck. Lightning strikes can easily travel 10 miles or more. A record lightning flash in Oklahoma in 2007 traveled nearly 200 miles. Seek shelter if you hear thunder.
Do not shelter under a tree. If lightning strikes the tree, the ground charge from the strike could travel into you.
Don’t huddle in a group. If you are outdoors with friends or family during a thunderstorm, don’t all clump together. Keeping separation could reduce the number of people injured if lightning strikes.
This article was generated by The Arizona Republic and USA TODAY Network using data released by the National Weather Service. It was edited by a staff member.
Republican election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, are working to restore faith in elections amid former President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
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With Donald Trump pulling out of his “60 Minutes” interview tonight, we’ll turn to a different Republican who is paying the price for Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election. Stephen Richer helps administer voting in Maricopa County, Arizona. That’s Phoenix and home to 60% of Arizona voters. Maricopa is often decisive in a state which swings either way. Trump claimed Maricopa county was stolen in 2020. Republican Stephen Richer was determined to find the truth — to restore belief in the ballot. He discovered that truth wasn’t what many wanted to hear.
Stephen Richer: I’ve become much more cynical about politics. There are a lot of people who have no lines in the sand. A lot of politicians. A lot of politicians for whom it’s like oxygen, that if you told them they weren’t going to be reelected, it would be like unplugging them from oxygen. So whichever way the winds are blowing, even if it’s highly immoral, that they’re on– they’re on for the ride.
Scott Pelley: What are your fears for this coming Election Day?
Stephen Richer: That we’ll, we’ll be doing this again for another four years.
Nearly four years ago, Republican attorney Stephen Richer was the voter’s choice for Maricopa County recorder, the office that records voter registration and handles ballots by mail. Richer took office after the 2020 vote when his own party was up in arms over allegations of fraud. It was Richer’s first elected office and he knew what to do.
Stephen Richer: They just need answers. It– it– it’s not that complicated of an issue. It’s just people are uncertain. They expected Donald Trump to win. I expected Donald Trump to win in Maricopa County. He didn’t win. They have questions. As soon as we give them logical, factual answers, all will be well.
Scott Pelley: And that’s not what happened?
Stephen Richer: That is not what happened.
Stephen Richer
60 Minutes
The ‘logical, factual’ answers came after multiple investigations. A hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million paper ballots confirmed Joe Biden won. Statewide, prosecutions for illegal voting involved a total of 19 ballots. In Maricopa, 50 ballots had been counted twice for a typical reason.
Stephen Richer: Somebody made a mistake. A human being made a mistake. There were 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election. These 50 shouldn’t have been tabulated. By no means were the 50 all for one candidate or another, so it had a negligible impact on the actual contest.
Negligible too, because Trump lost Maricopa County by 45,109 votes.
Scott Pelley: What evidence of widespread fraud was found in Maricopa County in 2020?
Stephen Richer: Oh, none. And I would say Maricopa County’s 2020 election is the most scrutinized election in human history.
Scott Pelley: When you began to tell your fellow Republicans in Maricopa County that the election was fair and there was no fraud that would change the outcome, how did they react to you?
Stephen Richer: Not well. Yeah. Not well at all.
They included Trump, who said, “the entire database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been deleted.(!)” He called it an “unbelievable election crime.”
Stephen Richer: It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was in the office looking at the very thing that he was– saying we had deleted. And so just sort of the– like, the– the– the– the ludicrous nature of it, it just is– is– is offensive.
Scott Pelley: What did you say in response to what the president had written?
Stephen Richer: I said something like, “This is unhinged. I’m looking at the voter registration database right now. These lies have to stop. This is as disprovable as saying two plus two equals five.“
Scott Pelley: And the reaction was what?
Stephen Richer: The reaction was significant.
Three violent threats to Stephen Richer have been prosecuted. One man got three-and-a-half years. The others are awaiting trial.
Undaunted, Richer explained the facts. Here, in 2021, he was heckled and followed to his car.
Stephen Richer: People were banging on my windshield as I got into the car.
Scott Pelley: What were they shouting?
Stephen Richer: “Turncoat,” “You’re wrong,” “You’re an idiot,” “Don’t be a traitor,” “How could you?”
The fever has never broken. This was three months ago.
Stephen Richer: I do not believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Response: Boooooo!
Scott Pelley: So why do so many people remain passionately unconvinced?
Stephen Richer: I think it has become– the– the– the tattoo. I think it has become the tattoo to show that you’re a true believer of the movement.
Stephen Richer
60 Minutes
Scott Pelley: You believe the election was stolen.
Shelby Busch: I do.
Shelby Busch started a political action committee which investigates what she calls widespread fraud in Maricopa County—fraud no credible investigation has found. She’s taken in nearly a million dollars in donations for the work of her PAC. And the Arizona Republican Party awarded her the leadership of its delegation at last summer’s national convention.
Shelby Busch: …and that’s why I, Shelby Busch, the delegation chair and our wonderful state chairwoman Gina Swoboda and this entire delegation counts their 43 delegates to Donald J. Trump.
Scott Pelley: You are a rising star in the state party.
Shelby Busch: Well, I definitely have brought some attention onto myself, that is for sure.
Scott Pelley: What do you believe happened in the Maricopa vote in 2020?
Shelby Busch: I believe that fraudulent votes were put into the system. I also believe that a lot of– state statutes and regulations and policies were broke, which makes the election questionable at best.
Busch still questions whether signature verification was proper and whether some ballots were collected illegally. She’s an administrator in a medical practice.
Scott Pelley: You’re self-educated–
Shelby Busch: That’s correct–
Scott Pelley: –when it comes to elections.
Shelby Busch: That’s correct.
Scott Pelley: In a recent case a judge disqualified you from testifying in the case because he said you were, quote, “Obviously unqualified… not even in the ballpark.”
Shelby Busch: That’s one judge’s opinion. who is a radical leftist who is legislating from the bench and I don’t believe that it had any merit in my credibility whatsoever.
Scott Pelley: Is there a danger in undermining people’s faith in the election system by persisting with these conspiracy theories that no one has been able to validate?
Shelby Busch: Again, I’m going to disagree with you, sir, respectfully– it has been validated. And because–
Scott Pelley: Where? By whom?
Shelby Busch: The election officials–
Scott Pelley: Give me– give me a court case. Give me something.
Shelby Busch: I don’t need a government official with a vested interest in disproving information to tell me whether what I have is valid. It’s up to each individual citizen, as a member of this society, to review the evidence, to think for themselves and make those decisions.
Scott Pelley: It’s valid ’cause you say it is.
Shelby Busch: I say it’s valid because I say it is. And if somebody looks at it, they can determine whether it’s valid. The evidence speaks for itself. Data does not lie. Data doesn’t lie. Election officials do.
Ben Ginsberg: The election was not stolen, it was lost.
Attorney Ben Ginsberg has represented the Republican Party in many of its most important election cases. In 2022, he joined conservative judges and senators in “Lost, Not Stolen,” an investigation that exposes election fraud lies. Part of it centers on Trump’s swing state lawsuits.
Republican election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Ben Ginsberg: Donald Trump and his supporters brought 64 cases. They lost 63 of them outright. There was one that was a partial victory involving 200 votes, far from outcome determinative.
Scott Pelley: And all of that told you what?
Ben Ginsberg: The evidence to back up the allegations of fraud and elections being unreliable simply does not exist.
Scott Pelley: The election deniers in Arizona will say, “We did lose all those cases, but the judges weren’t fair.”
Ben Ginsberg: Under the rule of law, you have every right to submit your litigation. But under the rule of law, a conservative principle, a Republican principle for as long as I’ve been practicing election law, you have to accept the rulings of the court.
Shelby Busch: I don’t have time, frankly, to worry about whether people believe me or question my integrity. I have what I believe is the mission that I am on, and that mission is for my children and my grandchildren. I’m not here to make friends. I am here to do a job.
Scott Pelley: Where does that mandate for that mission come from?
Shelby Busch: It comes from my own personal drive, and it also comes from, I believe, a calling from God.
It has been a calling for many, over nearly four years, in meetings of the Republican-led Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which certifies the vote.
Scott Pelley: Have you been accused of treason?
Clint Hickman: Oh yeah. treason– murdering fellow officials that would talk.
Republican Clint Hickman has been a county supervisor 11 years. In 2020 he was among Trump’s most loyal supporters.
Clint Hickman: Still proud that he took the time to call me out and thank me for the work that I was trying to accomplish
But Hickman saw no evidence of fraud and said so when he voted to certify the election.
Scott Pelley: You’ve received a number of death threats.
Clint Hickman: I’ve lost count. I have lost count. And so have my colleagues. And so have– so have election workers.
Scott Pelley: Well, you’ve lost count, but here’s one.
Voicemail: Hello Mr. Hickman, I am glad that you are standing up for democracy and want to place your hand on the Bible and say that the election was honest and fair. I really appreciate that. When we come to lynch your stupid lying Commie ass, you’ll remember that you lied on the f***ing Bible, you piece of s**t. You’re gonna die, you piece of s**t. We’re going to hang you. We’re going to hang you.
That man is in prison for two-and-a-half years. But there were others.
Clint Hickman
60 Minutes
Clint Hickman: But the chilling one that you didn’t play is one of the guys said, “We know the restaurants that you are in. And we know where your kids go to school.”
Menace grew in the shadows and emerged on the stage.
Shelby Busch: I hear the word “unity” and I get sick to my stomach. Because there is a lot of earthly, fake and vile unity talk going around in our state.
This is Shelby Busch, the Maricopa County Republican Party vice-chair, talking about fellow Republican Stephen Richer this past March.
Shelby Busch: So what does unity mean to me? It means unifying with those that share the core biblical, Christian—Judeo principles that we share. That’s unity. But if Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him. I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country.
Scott Pelley: When you heard Shelby Busch say that she would lynch you–
Stephen Richer: Yeah.
Scott Pelley:–you thought what?
Stephen Richer: I first thought like, “Why is that word in your vocabulary?” Lynch is a weirdly historically loaded and oddly specific term.
Busch offered a modified definition of lynching.
Shelby Busch: I think many people are familiar with a political lynching. It’s– it’s referred to as– destroying someone’s career. It was not ever meant physically in any way, shape, or form. Probably a poor choice of words.
Scott Pelley: You have seen the unrest in this county. The civil disorder in this county. You’re contributing to that.
Shelby Busch: What I am doing is I am shining a big bright light on the disdain and the arrogance of some of the elected officials. They are elected to represent the interests of the people. And until they are ready to step up and do that, then there will be unrest.
Scott Pelley: Is election denialism a swindle?
Stephen Richer: Oh, 100% so for some people. It’s a swindle emotionally for some. It’s a swindle politically for some. It’s a swindle economically for some.
This past July, Stephen Richer ran in the primary for reelection. He lost to a fellow Republican who said Maricopa elections are a “laughing stock.” Richer moves on after this election, leaving behind his enduring contribution — the fortress defenses around the center where the votes are counted—a wall to defend America from Americans.
Stephen Richer: I have seen some ugliness in the character of human beings. It has given me great insight into horrific moments of human history. I would look at some of these historical moments and say, like, “Well, that– that–that couldn’t happen here.” But moments like these begin to give you insight on how stuff like that can build up, how the animal passions, how going along with the crowd, how the emotions of just being your side versus their side. It’s just to say that some of the same human impulses– that I didn’t understand, I now do understand.
Scott Pelley: You understand how things can go wrong?
Stephen Richer: I understand how a society of educated people can do something truly horrible.
Produced by Aaron Weisz and Ian Flickinger. Broadcast associate, Michelle Karim. Edited by Sean Kelly.
Scott Pelley, one of the most experienced and awarded journalists today, has been reporting stories for 60 Minutes since 2004. The 2024-25 season is his 21st on the broadcast. Scott has won half of all major awards earned by 60 Minutes during his tenure at the venerable CBS newsmagazine.
Eviction filings in Maricopa County courts increased sharply last year as pandemic-era rent relief withered away, with some months showing record numbers for the last two decades.
Landlords moved to evict tenants in court 83,236 times in 2023, court data shows, a rise of about 23% from the 67,491 filings in 2022. The months of September and October 2023, when property owners filed, respectively, 7,809 and 7,948 evictions in county courts, are the highest figures for those months in the last 23 years. (The county’s electronic eviction records go back to 2000.)
While only 13% of eviction filings in 2023 yielded actual eviction orders for tenants, housing and tenant advocates worry the number of evictions will continue to rise and result in catastrophic levels of tenant displacement.
“We’re not doing anything differently,” said Maxine Becker, an attorney with Wildfire Arizona, an anti-poverty advocacy organization. “And whatever bits of help were out there are going to be completely gone. I don’t see any reason why (the numbers) would suddenly go down.”
Several converging economic factors have fueled the eviction crisis, including meteoric rises in rent in metro Phoenix, a lack of affordable housing options and wages that haven’t kept up with the cost of living, according to Nicole Newhouse, executive director of the Arizona Housing Coalition. The coalition is a nonprofit seeking to provide safe housing and end homelessness in Arizona.
A Maricopa Association of Governments analysis of U.S. Census Data shows that apartment rent has gone up about 38% in the last four years in metro Phoenix. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the area was $1,550 in 2023, the study says.
The increase in rent, Newhouse said, can be blamed in part on landlords who opportunistically raised rents once the statewide evictions pause was lifted in late 2020 by then-Gov. Doug Ducey.
“People were in various states of their leases, and when those leases were up, because landlords weren’t able to get paid from some of their tenants, tenants were evicted, and then landlords were able to raise the rents,” Newhouse said.
The area also faces a general housing shortage. In 2022, the Arizona Housing Department estimated the state needs 270,000 more housing units to serve its population. “We haven’t built enough housing for people who have the least,” Becker said. “That is what really is driving the problem.”
MAG estimated last June that these high-rent conditions landed the hardest on area residents with the least economic means.
About 548,000 households, or a third of the city’s tenant population, are cost-burdened, meaning that they spend about 30% of their income on rent. Further, 256,000 households spend half of their earnings on rent, or are severely cost-burdened. Almost all of the cost-burdened households, about 92%, earn less than $75,000 a year, MAG estimates.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes highlighted the apartment landlords she accused of price fixing during a press conference on Feb. 28.
TJ L’Heureux
Few options to slow evictions
How are public entities trying to curb evictions?
Maricopa County created a new Housing Stability Rental Assistance program in February to aid renters experiencing “greatest need,” a county spokesperson said.
The program draws from a $10 million pool of funds allocated to the county through the American Rescue Plan Act, a federal aid package awarded to local governments for pandemic recovery and infrastructure investments.
It will help pay up to two months of back or future rent for households that meet the federal eligibility threshold of less than $84,000 in yearly income, said Czelsi Gomez, a public information officer for the county. Tenants can apply for the program online.
Before the HSRA, the county relied on the Emergency Rental Assistance program to prevent tenant displacement. The ERA, which ended Jan. 19 after providing $141.6 million in rent and utility assistance in Maricopa County, was also funded with federal dollars, disbursed to states during the pandemic to address tenant displacement in the economic downturn.
Funds for the program have been fully spent, and the county doesn’t plan to extend the program further, Gomez said.
“ERA was always intended to provide temporary relief to those impacted by the national and local health emergency,” Gomez said.
Greenlight Communities broke ground on Streamliner 16th on East Polk Street in April 2023. The 208-unit complex is supposed to offer “attainable” — if not affordable — housing.
Katya Schwenk
Property rights trump tenant rights in Arizona
The county hopes to reduce the number of evictions by providing legal assistance to tenants. The county has contracted with Community Legal Services, a local nonprofit legal service provider, to help tenants facing eviction.
The program started in 2021 when the County Board of Supervisors used $2.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to launch the program. The program’s allocation in 2023 was $323,561, and Gomez said it served 2,269 individuals last year, including referrals, calls and negotiations with landlords.
Legal advocates, however, question the effectiveness of legal representation in the face of eviction, saying state law is too deferential to property owners. Becker said, for example, that tenants don’t have much recourse under Arizona law to fight an eviction if their home is in disrepair.
“It doesn’t matter if a landlord doesn’t fix your air conditioning or your plumbing when you’ve got leaks,” Becker said. “That is not a legal defense in Arizona.”
Becker attributes the lack of legal strategies to the state’s strong sense of property ownership rights.
“It really drives the state in a lot of ways,” she said. “They need to be allowed to do whatever they want with that property, and I respect that value,” Becker said. “But I think that it’s also just kind of clouded our ability to look at how the economic conditions have changed.”
For Becker, these values translate into a culture of shame around evictions. There is a belief, she said, “that if you can’t pay your rent, you’ve done something wrong. You didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t budget properly, you made bad decisions.”
But the private and philanthropic sectors are starting to develop solutions, she said. It starts with a change of perception.
“There’s more thought now going into prevention entirely,” she said. “We are looking at some of these eviction issues that have started out as a $400 problem, a couple hundred dollars short on rent. We are looking at how we identify those folks and see if we can help them with the smaller dollar amount before it escalates into an eviction.”
PHOENIX – In the first-ever labor action of its kind in Arizona, cannabis workers at a marijuana dispensary in Phoenix went on strike.
“Your direct action here today speaks volumes, and when you take brave courageous actions like this to walk off the job, you not only are fighting for yourselves and your coworkers, but for every worker who is taken advantage of by their employer and by corporations,” said State Rep. Analise Ortiz. The Democratic Parry state lawmaker represents the state’s 24th Legislative District, which covers a portion of Maryvale.
Workers at Curaleaf Midtown, along with elected leaders and community members, protested during the afternoon of Sept. 15 near Central Avenue and Thomas Road.
“People over profit, justice over greed, cannabis for all not just corporate need,” said Mario Gonzalez.
Here’s what to know about the labor action.
Why are they striking?
Some Arizona Cannabis workers go on strike
In the first labor action of its kind in Arizona history, cannabis workers with one marijuana dispensary in the Phoenix area went on strike over issues related to pay, benefits, and working conditions, among others. FOX 10’s Stephanie Bennett reports.
The workers at the dispensary voted in favor of unionizing on June 30, 2022, but according to a statement released by officials with UFCW Local 99, the workers still do not have a union contract.
The group is demanding, among other things, better pay, benefits, working conditions, and safety. They also…
PEORIA, Ariz. – A Peoria man is facing deportation for growing five extra marijuana plants than what is legally allowed to help with his chronic shoulder pain.
“Never thought I would do anything that was bad enough to get me deported,” said 53-year-old Dennis Mejic. “I was, like, a plant can get you deported? But apparently it can.”
If Mejic had 12 plants on Oct. 10, 2012, he would not be facing any legal repercussions. At the time, Mejic says he had a medical marijuana card for pain sustained after years of construction work.
However, Mejic was growing 17 plants at the time. According to paperwork we obtained, Peoria Police initiated a search warrant on his home, after Mejic says a neighbor complained about the smell. The exact reason is unclear in the report. Police found the plants growing in two rooms. Many were small and not yet flowering.
Mejic was taken to court, and negotiated a deal to plead guilty to one count of ‘Attempt to Commit Production of Marijuana,’ which is a Class 6 felony. After a year of probation, the charge was downgraded to a misdemeanor.
Mejic thought the nightmare was over, until ICE officials showed up at his front door in 2013.
“So in the end, that criminal case kind of ended with probation – Don’t do that again – but nothing with regard to deportation until ICE got involved, and they charged him immediately with an aggravated felony, which is basically automatic detention and automatic deportation,” said Mejic’s attorney, David…
In Phoenix, a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit now somehow counts as a respite. On Monday, America’s hottest major city ended its ominous streak of 31 straight days in which temperatures crested past 110. The toll of this heat—a monthly average of 102.7 degrees in July—has been brutal. One woman was admitted to a hospital’s burn unit after she fell on the pavement outside her home, and towering saguaros have dropped arms and collapsed. Over the past month, hospitals filling up with burn and heat-stroke victims have reached capacities not seen since the height of the pandemic.
“Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” You might ask that question to the many hundreds of thousands of new residents who have made the Arizona metropolis America’s fastest-growing city. Last year, Maricopa County, where Phoenix sits, gained more residents than any other county in the United States—just as it did in 2021, 2019, 2018, and 2017.
At its core, the question makes a mystery of something that isn’t a mystery at all. For many people, living in Phoenix makes perfect sense. Pleasant temperatures most of the year, relatively inexpensive housing, and a steady increase in economic opportunities have drawn people for 80 years, turning the city from a small desert outpost of 65,000 into a sprawling metro area of more than 5 million. Along the way, a series of innovations has made the heat seem like a temporary inconvenience rather than an existential threat for many residents. Perhaps not even a heat wave like this one will change anything.
My first morning in Phoenix, more than 20 years ago, the sun broke the horizon two miles up a trail in South Mountain Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the United States. I had arrived the previous night from Michigan, leaving behind the late-March dreariness that passes for spring in the Midwest for several months of research that would become my book, Power Lines. As the sun turned the mountain golden and I stripped down to short sleeves for the first time in months, I realized the Valley of the Sun’s charms.
Outside the summer months, the quality of life in Phoenix is really quite high—a fact that city boosters have promoted stretching back to before World War II. They traded the desiccated “Salt River Valley” for the welcoming “Valley of the Sun.” Efforts to downplay the dangers of Phoenix’s climate go back even further. In 1895, when Phoenix was home to a few thousand people, a local newspaper reported that it had been proved “by figures and facts” that the heat is “all a joke,” because the “sensible temperature” that people experienced was far less severe than what the thermometers recorded. “But it’s a dry heat” has a long history, one in which generations of prospective newcomers have been taught to perceive Phoenix’s climate as more beneficial than oppressive.
Most people surely move to Phoenix not because of the weather, but because of the housing. The Valley of the Sun’s ongoing commitment to new housing development continues to keep housing prices well below those of neighboring California, drawing many emigrants priced out of the Golden State. Subdivisions have popped up in irrigated farm fields seemingly overnight. In 1955, as the home builder John F. Long was constructing Maryvale, then on Phoenix’s western edge, he quickly turned a cantaloupe farm into seven model homes. Five years later, more than 22,000 people lived in the neighborhood; now more than 200,000 do. Even today, the speed of construction can create confusion, as residents puzzle over the location of Heartland Ranch or Copper Falls or other new subdivisions that include most of the 250,000 homes built since 2010.
Even in the summer, you might not always notice just how harsh of a terrain Phoenix can be. Developers engage in a struggle to secure water rights, tapping groundwater aquifers, drawing water from the Colorado River brought to the city by aqueduct, and purchasing water from local farmers. Air-conditioning is the lifeblood of Phoenix, as much a part of the city as the subway system is in New York. In 1961, Herbert Leggett, a Phoenix banker, spoke of his normal summer day to The Saturday Evening Post: “I awake in my air-conditioned home in the morning … I dress and get into my air-conditioned automobile and drive to the air-conditioned garage in the basement of this building. I work in an air-conditioned office, eat in an air-conditioned restaurant, and perhaps go to an air-conditioned theater.”
In the kind of air-conditioned bubbles Leggett described, it is actually possible for people like me, who work indoors, to forget the heat and oppression of Phoenix’s summer—that is, until we have to scurry across a parking lot or cross concrete plazas between buildings. Starting in late April, when high temperatures regularly hit over 90, many residents fire up their AC, using it until October, when highs once again drop into the 80s. At the height of summer, Phoenix becomes virtually an indoor city during the day. Remote car starters become valuable amenities for taking the edge off the heat. Runners wake before dawn to exercise, and dogs are banned from hiking trails in city parks on triple-digit days. With air-conditioning, the benefits of Phoenix outweigh the drawbacks for many residents.
But this lifestyle comes with a cost. Electricity consumption has soared in Phoenix, almost doubling in the average home from 1970 to today. At the height of its operation, Four Corners Power Plant, only one of five such coal-fired power plants built north of Phoenix to help power the region’s growth, emitted 16 million tons of carbon annually, equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 3.4 million cars. Even today, with most coal-fired generation retired, Phoenix relies heavily on carbon-emitting natural gas for its electricity. Both the past and present of Phoenix’s energy worsens the very heat its residents are trying to escape.
Air-conditioning protects most people, but especially as the heat intensifies, those without it are left incredibly vulnerable. Elderly women living alone, many of whom struggle to maintain and pay for air-conditioning, are particularly susceptible, accounting for the majority of indoor heat-related deaths. Unhoused people, whose population in Phoenix has increased by 70 percent in the past six years, suffer tremendously and make up much of the death toll. One unhoused man recently compared sitting in his wheelchair to “sitting down on hot coals.”
This heat wave will end, but there will be another. Still, the horror stories of life in 115 degrees is hardly guaranteed to blunt Phoenix’s explosive growth. There are currently building permits for 80,000 new homes in the Phoenix metro area that have not yet commenced construction—homes that will require more water, more AC, and more energy.
But in a sense, nothing about Phoenix is unusual at all. The movement from air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space that Leggett described—and the massive energy use that makes it all run—is now typical in a country where nearly 90 percent of homes use air-conditioning. Clothing companies such as Land’s End advertise summer sweaters that “will come to your rescue while you’re working hard for those eight hours in your office, which might feel like an icebox at times.” And heat has claimed lives in “temperate” cities such as Omaha, Seattle, and Boston. Indeed, one 2020 study concluded that the Northeast had the highest rate of excess deaths attributable to heat.
“Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” serves as nothing more than a defensive mechanism. It makes peculiar the choices that huge numbers of Americans have made, often under economic duress—choices to move to the warm climates of the Sun Belt, to move where housing is affordable, to ignore where energy comes from and the inequalities it creates, and, above all, to downplay the threats of climate change. In that way, Phoenix isn’t the exception. It’s the norm.
The autopsy should have been a piece of cake. My patient had a history of widely metastatic cancer, which was pretty straightforward as far as causes of death go. Entering the various body cavities, my colleague and I found what we anticipated: Nearly every organ was riddled with tumors. But after we had completed the work, I realized that I knew why the patient had died, but not why he’d died that day. We found no evidence of a heart attack or blood clot or ruptured bowel. Nothing to explain his sudden demise. Yes, he had advanced cancer—but he’d been living with that cancer the day before he died, and over many weeks and months preceding. I asked my colleague what he thought. Perhaps there had been some subtle change in the patient’s blood chemistry, or in his heart’s electrical signaling, that we simply couldn’t see? “I guess the patient just up and died,” he said.
I’m a hospital pathologist; my profession is one of many trying to explain the end of life. In that role, I have learned time and again that even the most thorough medical exams leave behind uncertainty. Take the current spate of heat-related fatalities brought on by a summer of record-breaking temperatures. Residents of Phoenix endured a month of consecutive 110-degree days. People have been literally sizzling on sidewalks. And news organizations are taking note of what is said to be a growing body count: 39 heat deaths in Maricopa County, Arizona; 10 in Laredo, Texas. But the precision of these figures is illusory. Cause of death cannot be measured as exactly as the temperature, and what qualifies as “heat-related” will always be a judgment call: Some people die from heat; others just up and die when it happens to be hot.
Mortality is contested ground, a place where different types of knowledge are in conflict. In Clark County, Nevada, for example, coroners spend weeks investigating possible heat-related deaths. Families are interviewed, death scenes are inspected, and medical tests are performed. The coroner must factor in all of these sources of information because no single autopsy finding can definitively diagnose a heat fatality. A victim may be found to have suffered from hyperthermia—an abnormally high body temperature—or they may be tossed into the more subjective bucket of those who died from ”environmental heat stress.”
Very few deaths undergo such an extensive forensic examination in the first place. Most of the time, the circumstances appear straightforward—a 75-year-old has a stroke; a smoker succumbs to an exacerbation of his chronic lung disease—and the patient’s primary-care doctor or hospital physician completes the death certificate on their own. But heat silently worsens many preexisting conditions; oppressive temperatures can cause an already dysfunctional organ to fail. A recent study out of China estimated that mortality from heart attacks can rise as much as 74 percent during a severe, several-day heat wave. Another study from the U.S. found that even routine temperature fluctuations can subtly alter kidney function, cholesterol levels, and blood counts. Physicians can’t easily tease out these influences. If an elderly man on a park bench suddenly slouches over from a heart attack in 90-degree weather, it’s hard to say for sure whether the heat was what did him in. Epidemiologists must come to the rescue, using statistics to uncover those hidden causes at the population level. This bird’s-eye view shows a simple fact: Bad weather means more death. But it still doesn’t tell us what to think about the man on the bench.
Research (and common sense) tells us that some individuals are going to be especially vulnerable to climate risks. Poverty, physical labor, substandard housing, advanced age, and medical comorbidities all put one in greater danger of experiencing heat-related illness. The weather has a way of kicking you while you’re down, and the wealthy and able-bodied are better able to dodge the blows. A financial struggle as small as an unpaid $51 portion of an electricity bill can prove deadly in the summer. In the autopsies I’ve performed, a patient’s family, medical record, and living situation often told a story of long-term social neglect. But there was no place on the death certificate for me to describe these tragic circumstances. There was certainly no checkbox to indicate that climate change contributed to a fatality. Such matters were out of my jurisdiction.
The public-health approach to assessing deaths has its own problems. Mostly it’s confusing. Reams of scientific studies have reported on hundreds of different risk factors for mortality. Sultry weather appears to be dangerous, but so do skipping breakfast, taking naps, and receiving care from a male doctor. Researchers have declared just about everything a major killer. A few months ago, the surgeon general announced that feeling disconnected is as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The FDA commissioner has said that misinformation is the nation’s leading cause of premature death. And is poverty or medical error the fourth-leading cause? I can’t keep track.
With so many mortality statistics at our disposal, which ones get emphasized can be more a matter of politics than science. Liberals see the current heat wave—and its wave of heat-related deaths—as an urgent call to action to combat climate change, while conservatives dismiss this concern as a mental disorder. A recent Wall Street Journalop-ed concluded that worrying about climate change is irrational, because “if heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning.” (Humans survived thousands of years without penicillin, but syphilis was still a net negative.) Similarly, when COVID became the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., pandemic skeptics said it was a fiction: Victims were dying “with COVID,” not “from COVID.” Because many people who died of SARS-CoV-2 had underlying risk factors, some politicians and doctors brushed off the official numbers as hopelessly confounded. Who could say whether the virus had killed anyone at all?
The dismissal of COVID’s carnage was mostly cynical and unscientific. But it’s true that death certificates paint one picture of the pandemic, and excess-death calculations paint another. Scientists will be debating COVID’s exact body count for decades. Fatalities from heat are subject to similar ambiguities, even as their determination comes with real-world consequences. In June, for example, officials from Multnomah County, Oregon—where Portland is located—sued oil and gas producers over the effects of a 2021 heat wave that resulted in 69 heat-related deaths, as officially recorded. This statistic will likely be subjected to intense cross-examination. The pandemic showed us that casting doubt on the deceased is a convenient strategy.
No matter how we count the bodies, extreme weather leads to suffering—especially among the most vulnerable members of society. A lot of people have already perished during this summer’s heat wave. Their passing is more than a coincidence—not all of them just up and died.
Phoenix, Arizona — The population of Arizona’s Maricopa County — which includes the Phoenix metropolitan area — skyrocketed by 15% in the last decade. But now, the county could see a troubling flatline.
New construction that relies on groundwater will stop in some parts of the state after a report from the Arizona Department of Water Resources released earlier this month revealed Arizona’s booming population will outgrow its drought-stricken water supply if action isn’t taken.
Specifically, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs announced earlier this month that the state will put the brakes on new home construction in the area surrounding Phoenix, but not within the city of Phoenix itself.
“This pause will not affect growth within any of our major cities,” Hobbs said in a news conference following the report’s release.
The new state plan will immediately impact the surrounding suburbs of Phoenix, which includes towns like Queen Creek. While projects permitted before the announcement will not be impacted, 9,000 undeveloped properties without a secure water supply will remain vacant.
“It’s been an issue that we’ve been dealing with in Arizona from the very beginning,” carpenter Rick Collins told CBS News of the water supply. “It’s how it works here. If we don’t have water, we can’t build these communities.”
In Maricopa County alone, an estimated two billion gallons of water are used daily, according to numbers from the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s nearly twice as much use as New York City, which has about double Maricopa County’s population of approximately 4.5 million people.
“Of course we have concern, our council has been looking forward into the future knowing that this day was going to come,” said Paul Gardner, wastewater director for Queen Creek.
Gardner doesn’t see the region as in decline, but instead as “a community that is evolving.”
That evolution means relying more on reclaimed wastewater projects and spending tens of millions of dollars to buy water from the Colorado River.
However, climate change and growing demand across the West are also shrinking the Colorado River, which means the river as a water source could be cut off down the road. Last month, California, Arizona and Nevada reached a tentative agreement that would significantly cut their water use from the river over the next three years.
Meanwhile, Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyle Center for Water Policy, said Arizona’s own plan to limit construction ensures there is enough water for all, as Arizona adapts to a world with less of it.
“It is a proactive plan,” Sorensen said. “It is not reactive.”
PHOENIX – Several marijuana dispensaries in Arizona are voluntarily recalling some products due to possible fungal contamination.
The Arizona Dept. of Health Services says two strains produced by TRU Infusion – Zombie Cookies and Peach Gas – are being recalled after samples tested positive for Aspergillus.
So far, no illnesses have been reported. Health officials say there were errors in the testing results, which may have led to false negative results for contaminants.
“Once ADHS discovered the potential contamination, they contacted the facility that produced the products,” health officials said. “The licensee took immediate action to work with all distribution and retail partners to remove any potentially impacted products from store shelves.”
The affected batch numbers are 1110R29ZMBC and 1021R32PG.
Some marijuana products recalled in Arizona
What is Aspergillus?
According to the Mayo Clinic, Aspergillus is a mold that exists both indoors and outdoors.
“Most strains of this mold are harmless, but a few can cause serious illnesses when people with weakened immune systems, underlying lung disease or asthma inhale their fungal spores,” read a portion of the Mayo Clinic’s website.
Aspergillus, according to the Cleveland Clinic, can cause a disease known as Aspergillosis.
“In certain people, Aspergillus can cause allergic reactions, chronic lung conditions and invasive disease that spreads to your brain, kidneys, lungs or other organs,” read a portion of the…
Maricopa County, Arizona, defendants in a lawsuit filed by former GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake are looking to sanction Lake and her attorneys over the suit she filed challenging the integrity of the governor’s election.
The motion, which was joined by Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, comes shortly after a judge threw out Lake’s challenge of her defeat in the governor’s race. The county wants to sanction the former TV anchor and her counsel, saying they filed a “bad-faith” lawsuit. The courts do not exist to “make political statements” and “fundraise,” or to “harass political opponents” and sow “completely unfounded doubts” about the integrity of the 2022 midterms, the motion states. The motion argues Lake owes $25,000 in attorneys’ fees.
“Enough really is enough, It is past time to end unfounded attacks on elections and unwarranted accusations against election officials,” the motion says.
Last week, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, appointed by former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, found the court did not find clear and convincing evidence of the widespread misconduct that Lake claimed affected the outcome of the election. Lake and her attorneys particularly focused on issues with ballot printers at some polling locations in populous Maricopa County in the suit against Maricopa County officials and Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state.
Lake, who lost to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes, was among the most vocal Republicans pushing former President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. She continued to cast doubt on the midterms well before Election Day.
“Before a single vote was counted in the 2022 general election, Kari Lake publicly stated that she would accept the results of the gubernatorial election only if she were the winning candidate,” the motion says. “When all the votes were counted and the result of the election certified, establishing that Ms. Lake had lost the election to Defendant-Contestee Katie Hobbs, plaintiff stayed true to her promise. But she has not simply failed to publicly acknowledge the election results. Instead, she filed a groundless, 70-page election contest lawsuit against the governor-elect, the secretary of state, and Maricopa County and several of its election officials and employees, thereby dragging them and this court into this frivolous pursuit.”
As millions of Americans returned to their jobs this week after the Thanksgiving holiday, several of the elected leaders of Cochise County, Arizona, opted not to do theirs.
The board of supervisors in this sparsely populated southeastern chunk of the state refuses to certify the county’s midterm-election results. Of course, nothing actually went wrong in Cochise County’s election. Instead, on Monday, the two Republican members of the Cochise County board outvoted its single Democrat to delay certification of the election, missing the deadline. By refusing to complete the process, these two officials chose instead to make a kind of generalized protest against imagined election fraud in Arizona. Their action could mean that Cochise County voters won’t have their ballots counted in the state’s final results.
Nullifying the votes of some 47,000 people for no reason is certainly a choice—and a nihilistic one at that. These two board members are engaging in a strategy of bottom-up election obstruction, apparently to clog the gears of democracy with enough sand to spread distrust throughout the entire system. Nationally, the Cochise County supervisors’ strategy may prove inconsequential, at least for now. But it’s a perfect illustration of the state of American democracy—and could be a test run of much greater consequence for 2024.
Even though prominent election deniers lost big in the November polls, in both Arizona and elsewhere, the election-denial movement is still alive, and even thriving, at the state and local level around the country. The “Stop the Steal” blueprint that Donald Trump drew up is there for anyone to follow, in the next presidential cycle and quite possibly beyond.
Before the midterms, election experts had their eyes fixed on Arizona, and in particular on Cochise County, 200 miles southeast of Phoenix. There, in the home of the Dragoon Mountains and the old frontier boomtown of Tombstone, suspicion of voting machines runs deep—so much so that county officials were demanding a full hand recount of the votes before the election had even happened. (Although all Arizona postelection audits require a small hand-counted sample, a full hand count of the votes would be illegal and, experts say, extremely prone to error.) In the end, the Arizona Supreme Court had to prevent Cochise County officials from doing it.
Ultimately, Election Day went smoothly in Cochise, and Republicans cleaned house in the county’s results: The GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters defeated their Democratic opponents there by 18 and 11 points respectively, even though both lost overall. Still, county GOP leaders wouldn’t take yes for an answer, and they weren’t finished sowing chaos.
One of the Republican supervisors acknowledged in an interview that delaying the county’s election certification was in fact intended as a protest over the election—not in Cochise, but in Maricopa County, where Republicans claim, without evidence, that machine errors disenfranchised thousands of voters. In other words, the play here is to use local political control in one county to cast doubt on another’s larger and more politically important election—to taint the entire process by contaminating a small piece of it.
As I reported at the time, Maricopa County did have some technical problems on Election Day. Dozens of tabulation-machine printers weren’t working, despite those machines having been previously tested for accuracy. But voters weren’t turned away from polling sites. Instead, their ballots were dropped in an auxiliary box and taken to the county’s central tabulation center, to be counted along with millions of other ballots. If anyone was disenfranchising Arizonans, it was the state’s GOP leaders demanding that voters not put their ballot in the auxiliary box.
But all of that is truly beside the point. Certification is not just a formality; the process enables officials to review an election for wrongdoing. Which sometimes happens! Back in 2018, the North Carolina state election board refused to certify the results of a House race, because Republican campaign operatives had engaged in illegal ballot harvesting and tampering.
But nothing like that went down in Cochise or Maricopa Counties this year. Instead, local GOP officials are choosing to invalidate the votes of their own neighbors in order to express their displeasure with an election outcome. It’s childish. It’s wrong. It seems very illegal. And it’s probably not going to work. On Monday, Secretary of State (and now Governor-elect) Katie Hobbs filed a lawsuit against the board, tweeting that Cochise County “had a statutory duty to certify the results of the 2022 General Election by today.” The judge will hear the suit later today, and may offer a decision as early as this afternoon.
The most likely outcome is that the judge forces the board to certify the election. “Stop the Steal” zealots have tried the Cochise move before, after all. Earlier this year, commissioners in heavily Republican Otero County, New Mexico, decided not to certify their party primary-election results. That didn’t fly at the state supreme court, which ruled that the commissioners had to do their jobs. (Commissioner Couy Griffin notably still voted no, announcing that his vote was “based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”) But if the court doesn’t force Cochise officials to change their ways, the secretary of state’s office could, in theory, tally the rest of Arizona’s votes without the county’s included. The irony is that, in a purely electoral sense, this would be great news for Democrats, potentially flipping a U.S. House seat from red to blue.
Something that became very clear in 2020 is that America’s election system relies not on spelled-out rules and regulations, but on human beings acting honestly. Before 2016, the certification process was not used as a weapon to fight back against a disappointing result. “That’s not how healthy democracies function,” Tammy Patrick, the program CEO for the election center at the National Association of Election Officials, told me. And American democracy is only as healthy as its weakest link.
What happens next in Cochise County may have little significant effect on the rest of the country. But Cochise serves as a reminder that the election-fraud myth persists. And in places where its believers have unchecked power, they will do their utmost to flex it.
The hope was that, after major midterm losses and continued rebukes from the courts, the election-denial movement would peter out—that Stop the Steal types might simply grow tired of failing. But if Trump is a viable candidate for president in 2024, you can expect him to sing from the same songbook he used in 2016 and 2020. Other candidates will amplify those lies, too, if they can benefit from doing so. Whether election denialism will survive independently of Trump is hard to anticipate. But Republicans “have seen that while it may not be the way to gain office, it is certainly the way to drive donations and fundraising and elevate your stature in the party,” Patrick said.
Cochise is a useful stress test for America’s electoral system “in terms of demonstrating the continued dangers to our democracy”—and what can be done about them, Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, told me. Congress should pass reforms to the Electoral Count Act, Hasen said. States can also try to prevent what’s happening in Cochise County from recurring in 2024. Colorado passed legislation this year clarifying its rules about certification. But state leaders are similarly well positioned to make the waters of democracy muddier. In 2021, Arizona Republicans tried and failed to pass legislation that would allow the state legislature to reject the results of an election it didn’t support. An upcoming Supreme Court decision on the authority of state legislatures in administering elections will be incredibly consequential to any future election-subversion efforts.
Over the past six years, millions of people in this country have been encouraged by political leaders on the right to see themselves as the real Americans—the nation’s true rulers—who are in danger of being cheated out of their political inheritance by voter fraud on the left. They’ve been trained to respond to electoral losses with deflection, conspiracy, and dishonesty. They don’t need Trump around to keep doing that.
Outside the Maricopa County tabulation center last weekend, a few dozen outraged Arizonans paced single file along the sidewalk waving KARI LAKE flags. Through megaphones, some of them denounced imaginary corruption schemes and clamored for a “redo” election. Others chanted the Lord’s Prayer, like the musicians on the Titanic playing hymns to calm the passengers.
The noteworthy thing about the Maricopa protest, though, wasn’t the scene. It was its singularity. Two years ago, shouts of “Stop the steal!” could be heard across the country in nearly every state. This year, the refrain was largely limited to one block in downtown Phoenix, where at times reporters outnumbered the demonstrators.
If any state was going to devolve into chaos after a disappointing election for Republicans, it would have been Arizona—ground zero for election denial in 2020, and where this year, primary voters nominated an entire slate of fringe election cranks to all of the state’s major offices. Instead, the midterms delivered a sure blow to the election-denial movement, both there and everywhere else: The most prominent conspiracists, such as the Arizona secretary-of-state candidate Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, lost by significant margins; some of these candidates even acknowledged their losses by—surprise!—actually conceding. On Monday night, Lake was declared the loser in her race for Arizona’s governorship, adding a final note to what has seemed like a comprehensive repudiation of the denialists. And where experts and reporters had anticipated widespread election-fraud mayhem, nothing close to it has yet emerged.
It would be foolish, though, to pronounce “Stop the Steal” dead. The movement may have fizzled without Donald Trump, but if he runs again in 2024, we haven’t seen the last of it. Even if Trump isn’t on the ballot, an entire swath of the Republican Party is now open to the idea that any narrow loss can be blamed on fraud. Trust in elections among rank-and-file GOP voters remains low, and in some respects has gotten worse, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center. The damage inflicted in 2020 endures. “He’s broken the seal,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of TheBulwark, told me. Election denial “is part of our politics now.”
Things could have been so much worse.
Ahead of the election, poll workers in Arizona and beyond feared for their safety, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law reported an uptick in calls to its Election Protection hotline. In the Phoenix suburbs, armed men were patrolling ballot drop-off sites. The day before the election, I watched a group of women stake out a ballot box, studying voters through binoculars for signs of cheating. The central counting facility in downtown Phoenix was fenced off with a ring of plastic Jersey barriers, and police patrolled the streets on horseback.
Election officials in Maricopa County, who appeared very tightly wound, held a press conference to get ahead of any potential claims of election chicanery. A time-consuming vote count does not indicate fraud, they reminded the room full of reporters; ballots are processed and reviewed by bipartisan teams; tabulation machines work.
Unfortunately, events on Election Day quickly undermined those careful efforts at reassurance. The sun had not yet risen when the first handful of tabulation machines stopped reading ballots. By midday, dozens of machines were malfunctioning at polling sites throughout the county. Voters at those sites were told to feed their ballots into “Door 3,” a regrettably sinister-sounding name for a secure slot that would sort the misread ballots to be counted later. And they would be counted later, as officials reassured voters in a series of follow-up press conferences.
Voters I spoke with were understandably confused and frustrated. And the malfunctioning machines had state GOP leaders immediately taking to Twitter to suggest wrongdoing. “They are incompetent and/or engaging in malfeasance just like in 2020,” GOP Chair Kelli Ward posted. Those complaints spiraled into partisan hysteria as the counting went on. Frustrated MAGA commentators suggested that Maricopa County officials had engaged in outright corruption and “CIVIC TERRORISM.” Finchem accused them of “screwing with the election counts.”
Still, despite those initial glitches and dark mutterings, Election Day unfolded mostly without threats or funny business. Poll workers weren’t harmed, and voters were, for the most part, not intimidated. Almost everyone on the America First Secretary of State Coalition slate lost last week, including Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who’d described Democrats as having a “satanic agenda”; Finchem, the mustachioed Oath Keeper of Arizona; and the head of the coalition himself, Nevada’s Jim Marchant.
Parroting Trump’s election lies got many Republican candidates across the finish line in their primary. Finchem’s repeated election-fraud claims won him a regular spot on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. The former president has praised Lake’s commitment to the bit, too, reportedly telling donors that even if asked about the weather, Lake would find a way to bring the conversation back to 2020.But thesewild claims proved poisonous to moderates and swing voters—polling suggests that some went to the polls explicitly to vote against deniers. We know this because many Republicans who didn’t traffic in election lies performed well: Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams by almost eight points in the Georgia governor’s race. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 points.
Fans of democracy can take heart that only 14 out of 94 election deniers won in races for positions that oversee elections, including secretary of state, attorney general, and governor, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for election integrity. Of those 14, only five candidates were not incumbents. “The movement is still not gaining ground,” Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of States United Action, told me.
That things didn’t turn out worse is a relief, given the chaos of 2020. But the dynamic of this year’s election was different in a few important ways. Republicans were on the defensive back then: The general election was a national referendum on their president. This year, Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot—whereas, in 2020, he had spent months priming the base to blame polling fraud if he lost. It’s clear now that nobody does Stop the Steal like 45.
“The thing that gives you power as an election denier is that people believe you, and Trump was able to make people believe him,” Longwell told me. Few other candidates have that power, and none in this midterm election could nationalize the issue as he did in the presidential contest. This time, the GOP had no central character over whom Trump supporters could feel outraged.
Yet the election-fraud fires that Trump and his allies have fanned for so long will not be easily extinguished. If repeated audits and cold evidence haven’t done enough to deter conspiracists these past two years, then a disappointing midterm cycle won’t dissuade them either.
Election deniers didn’t win in swing states, but elsewhere they did. Four of them will oversee elections in Indiana, Wyoming, Alabama, and South Dakota. More than 200 Republicans running for Congress and statewide positions who’d questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election won or retained their office last week, including more than 180 in the House. Other election deniers won at the state level in ultraconservative districts across the country. These ruby-red areas might sink deeper into denial, creating islands where both voters and officials are debilitatingly distrustful of elections.
Take Cochise County, Arizona. There, 170 miles southeast of Phoenix, some GOP election officials have been hankering to do a full hand-count audit in the election. Paradoxically, Republican candidates won handily there both this year and in 2020, so no obvious motive for distrusting the results is apparent. But the years-long drumbeat of misinformation from the state GOP chair, Ward, and her allied band of election-fraud kooks have nurtured a deep suspicion of the whole process.
Republican leaders in Arizona don’t believe in machine tabulation and view hand counts as the purest, most accurate way to tally votes—never mind the extensive evidence that the opposite is true. This year, Cochise County tried to forge ahead with a full hand-count audit, even after a judge ordered local officials not to. Only a timely ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court last week kept them from carrying one out. “What I’ll be doing over the next two years is looking at these counties that have gone really hard to the right,” Jessica Huseman, the editorial director of Votebeat, a nonpartisan election-news outlet, told me. “Because there’s no one to push back.”
Even in states where election deniers lost, voters have been primed to suspect outcomes they don’t like, glitches they don’t understand, and delays in counting. “If [Lake] doesn’t announce that she’s going to win tonight, we might have to go through like a week or so of shenanigans—the same shenanigans that they pulled in 2020,” Stephen Tenner, a former actor from New York, told me at a lavish GOP Election Night party in Scottsdale. “We’re waiting for it this time; we weren’t ready last time. So we’re going to catch the fraud.”
Other Republicans I interviewed were less persuaded of the likelihood of fraud, but were comfortable entertaining the idea. “I’d like to go back to same-day voting and paper ballots. There are problems with machines,” a man named William from Phoenix, who declined to give his last name, told me at the party. Would he blame fraud if Republicans lost? I asked. “Well, there were problems with the elections two years ago,” he said, adding that, this time around, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs should have recused herself from official duties during the election. “I would be hesitant to say I thought [this one] was completely honest.”
The thing about trust is that it’s painstakingly hard to build and relatively easy to demolish. Election denial is now a chronic wound in America’s body politic, only partially healed, and ready to reopen—red and raw—whenever circumstances permit. Those circumstances may arise sooner rather than later if Trump is on the ballot again in 2024. Even if he isn’t, the former president has already broken the tradition of gracious presidential concessions and peaceful transfers of power. He’s encouraged a populist animus toward institutions that will likely remain a litmus test for future Republican candidates. And more than anything, Trump has created a blueprint for exploiting the messiness and complexity of America’s elections. An audience for this type of exploitation is still out there, if Republicans want to take advantage of it.
On Monday, after Maricopa County released a decisive batch of ballots that led all major news networks to declare Hobbs the next governor of Arizona, a few members of Team Lake sprang into action to ensure that any ballots with errors were quickly cured. That’s a standard and legitimate procedure in elections, and can be helpful in especially close ones. But other Republicans continued to follow the denialist script. Ward accused Maricopa County of voter suppression. Finchem, the failed secretary-of-state candidate, began to do the impossible calculations. “I should win by 3% and @KariLake should win by 11%,” he tweeted. “If that doesn’t happen you know the real story.”
Lake’s own account was silent for more than an hour after the networks had called the race. After all of this, would this cycle’s Stop the Steal standard-bearer actually concede? The answer came at 10:30 p.m. eastern, with a simple tweet: “Arizonans know BS when they see it,” Lake wrote.
The results of pivotal races in Arizona and Nevada that could determine which party controls the Senate remain up in the air, and it could take several more days until there’s clarity on who won.
With key races in Arizona still undecided, there’s a dramatic legal conflict brewing over a small number of ballots that could end up playing a significant role in deciding some of the state’s (and the country’s) most important elections, including for the U.S. Senate, governor and secretary of state.
The dispute arose Tuesday as dozens of voting centers across Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and the majority of Arizona’s population — experienced printing errors: The ink was not dark enough on some ballots, resulting in voting tabulators failing to properly read the ink and spitting out the ballots without counting them.
Voters who ran into printing trouble had options. They could drop their uncounted ballots in a secure box attached to the tabulators, to be collected and counted at a central processing facility later; some 17,000 ballots were dropped in these boxes, known as “Box 3,” according to the county. Or they could “check out” of their polling place, leave, and try another polling place where the tabulators might have better luck reading the splotchy ballots. But Arizona Republicans have spent years spreading lies about election fraud in Maricopa County, and particularly about the dangers of using drop boxes, which led some voters to try their luck at another polling place. In Arizona, voters aren’t assigned a single voting site and have multiple options within their county.
Here’s the rub: In an unsuccessful lawsuit Tuesday evening seeking to extend voting for three hours, the national Republican Party and several candidates claimed that some poll workers failed to properly “check out” voters who opted to try a different polling place. As a result, when they arrived at the second polling place, the suit alleged, “these individuals remained inaccurately recorded in e-pollbooks as having already voted, and were either (a) required to vote using provisional ballots that will not be counted or (b) denied an opportunity to cast either a regular or provisional ballot.”
There were 7,000 provisional ballots total in Maricopa County — fewer than were issued in 2020, VoteBeat’s Jen Fifield noted. But Republicans could pursue legal action if the margin in an important race is smaller than that, arguing that the number of voters affected by the alleged “check out” issue could potentially change the election results, one Republican attorney said.
“We’re working with the county to determine how many votes are in this bucket, and if it has a potential effect on the outcome of the election, we’ll go back to court and make sure that those voters are treated fairly,” Kory Langhofer, an attorney for Republican Blake Masters’ Senate campaign, told HuffPost.
“If it has a potential effect on the outcome of the election, we’ll go back to court and make sure that those voters are treated fairly.”
– Kory Langhofer, attorney for Republican Blake Masters’ Senate campaign
There are still hundreds of thousands of votes left to be counted in Maricopa County — so the dispute over provisional ballots could end up a moot point. The court docket now shows a status conference for next Wednesday, as Capitol Media Services first reported. Langhofer said the hearing would concern whether and how to proceed with a legal challenge — namely, “whether to request a ruling on the provisional ballots at issue due to the failure to ‘check out’ voters.”
It’s also not clear how many ballots out of 7,000 provisionals could be related to the printing error and subsequent confusion over “checking out.” That’s part of the problem.
“Balancing the numbers in the vote centers where voters checked in, but left without casting a ballot nor getting ‘checked out’ will be difficult to reconcile,” said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser for elections at Democracy Fund and a former election official in Maricopa County. “There isn’t a process in place that allows for a voter whose record is flagged as having voted to dispute that and have their provisional count.”
During Tuesday’s hearing over the GOP’s effort to extend voting hours, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Tim Ryan rejected the GOP’s request, saying, “The court doesn’t have any evidence that any voter was precluded from their right to vote.”
Thomas P. Liddy, chief of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office’s civil division, similarly told HuffPost in an email, “We have no evidence that any voter who check-in to a vote center, chose not to vote and left the vote center without checking out.”
Liddy said such a situation was possible but unlikely.
“All of the poll workers were very well trained,” he said. “They know how to ‘check-out’ voters who Check-in, but then decide not to vote. It is part of the training class and it is in the training manual kept in the polling place.”
But Langhofer pointed to signed declarations from voters that he said showed otherwise.
“The inspector was confused and did not understand what I meant by ‘check out’ or ‘check in,’” said one voter cited in Republicans’ suit. Another claimed they saw voters ask to have their ballots spoiled so they could vote elsewhere, but that those individuals “were not instructed to ‘check out.’” Two voters, Nancy and Bill Mason, claimed they weren’t instructed to “check out” of their initial polling place after running into printer problems, and that they were unable to cast a ballot at a second location. Ultimately, they claimed they were only able to vote using provisional ballots.
“These people need to go to jail for what they did,” Bill Mason told HuffPost, noting he’d been escorted by police from the first polling place “because I wouldn’t leave, and I kept saying, ‘The election is rigged, that’s how you’re rigging it!’”
“I wouldn’t leave, and I kept saying, ‘The election is rigged, that’s how you’re rigging it!’”
– Bill Mason, Maricopa County resident who voted on a provisional ballot
There’s a clear irony in the situation: Had these voters trusted Maricopa County to truthfully tally their ballots, they may have simply opted to drop their ballots into “Box 3” to be counted by human beings at a central location. But voters primed by Republican disinformation didn’t trust that process.
“I don’t trust it to go in the box, the box may never make it down there!” one woman can be heard saying in an early viral video taken at a voting site with printer errors. “That happens all the time.”
Langhofer — who represented the GOP-controlled Arizona Senate during the bunk “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results, and represented the Trump campaign in Arizona before that — defended voters who might not trust the county’s human ballot-counters.
“Certain voters have heard about all of the concerns in election administration, and want to watch their ballot go into the tabulator,” he said.
Liddy, the Maricopa County attorney, pointed out that every voter had an opportunity to drop their ballots in “Box 3” if they were having tabulator issues. What’s more, he said, there are provisional ballots cast in every election.
“Was the voter provided a ‘reasonable opportunity to vote’ — that is the legal standard. The answer is YES,” he said. “Moreover, every affidavit provided by the RNC is signed by a person who voted.”
Mason, for his part, said he wanted to see his ballot tabulated “right then and there,” citing concerns about Maricopa County rigging elections. He pointed to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who for years has spread lies about election rigging, to explain why he didn’t want to drop his ballot in a secure box at his first polling place to be counted later at a central tabulating location.
“When it gets dropped in the box, that’s how they fix the election,” he said. “We don’t know where those ballots go or who’s counting them.”
PHOENIX, Ariz.—The Watchers tend to show up at sundown—or so I’d heard. And yesterday evening, I went looking for them. Around 7 p.m., at a ballot drop-off site next to a juvenile-detention center in Mesa, just east of Phoenix, I sat on a concrete bench and waited under the parking lot’s bright lights. A steady stream of cars drove through, and people hopped out to slip their green mail-in-ballot envelopes into the big metal box. After two hours, the Watchers arrived: three women in camp chairs, sitting far enough away in the semi-darkness to not be easily noticed. Each peered at the ballot box through a set of binoculars.
Here in Maricopa County, there have been a few reports of such citizen surveillance operations: people keeping an eye out for so-called mules, who might be stuffing stacks of illegitimate ballots into the boxes. Sometimes, these Watchers have carried guns. When I approached the women, they declined to tell me their names. They all looked to be in their early 60s—around my mom’s age, I kept thinking—and were bundled up against the chilly desert air. They sat around a folding table on which sat travel mugs and a single bag of kettle chips. The trunk of their SUV was open in order, I assume, to obscure their license plate.
“We’re just doing our due diligence,” one of them told me. I asked if they were looking out for voters dropping off multiple ballots. “Well, it’d have to be more than a couple, because people drop them off for their family,” another said, without looking away from her binoculars. So how was it going? I asked. The third woman, wearing a green visor over her curly hair, looked at me and shrugged: “It all seems like it’s on the up and up so far.”
For the past two years, Maricopa County has served as the beating heart of America’s emergent election-denial movement—ever since then-President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden here in 2020. Back then, “Stop the Steal” groups protested for weeks to overturn the closer-than-expected results, and a noisy partisan review of the results kept national media attention on Arizona for nearly a year—until even that clown show of an inquiryconcluded that Biden had, in fact, won.
By Monday night, on the eve of another election, GOP leaders in the state had spent so long fanning the flames of conspiracy theory that many voters were anticipating trickery. Election Day may once have been a moment to celebrate democracy and savor the ritual of taking part in the political process. But to visit Maricopa County today is to visit a place on high alert.
“We have enough security to invade a small country,” one county leader told me at the Tabulations and Elections Center, which attracted angry protests in 2020 and is now surrounded by heavy plastic Jersey barriers. The day before, Sheriff Paul Penzone had told the press that plainclothes police officers would be present at every voting location all Election Day—and that they would exercise a “zero tolerance” policy toward anyone threatening voters or poll workers, he said.
At that same press conference, county leaders aimed to get a head start on debunking some of the false narratives that might emerge in the coming days. Bill Gates, the chair of the county board of supervisors, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, reiterated that a days-long vote count does not indicate any fraud; that voting machines are tested for accuracy and are not susceptible to hacking; and that ballots are reviewed and processed by a bipartisan team of election workers.
Already on Election Day, though, those careful efforts at transparency and heading off mistrust were undermined by the most unfortunate error: Early this morning, tabulation machines in roughly 20 percent of Maricopa County’s more than 200 polling sites stopped working. Voters at these centers have had to choose whether to put their ballots in a secure box to be counted later at the Tabulation Center in downtown Phoenix or to travel to a different polling location to cast a vote. (The root of the machines’ malfunctioning had been identified and begun to be resolved by late afternoon, according to the county elections department.)
Whatever voters choose, their ballots will be counted, county officials have assured. But the damage has been done. The problems have understandably frustrated voters—and, perhaps more dangerously, tossed an enormous hunk of raw meat into the ravening jaws of the election conspiracists. “They are incompetent and/or engaging in malfeasance just like in 2020,” the state GOP chair Kelli Ward tweeted this morning. She and others have suggested that the tabulators seemed to be malfunctioning only in conservative areas. Kari Lake, the Republican running for Arizona governor, told reporters that she chose to vote in a liberal area “because we wanted to make sure we had good machines.”
Trump, always eager to take advantage of an election-fraud narrative, has weighed in too. “People of Arizona, don’t get out of line until you cast your vote,” the former president posted on Truth Social. “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY. Don’t let it happen!”
A few hours after the tabulation news came in this morning, Gates and Richer delivered another impromptu press conference, and shared a video showing voters what a tabulation machine looks like and explaining that all valid ballots, regardless of how they’re submitted, will be counted. Shortly after 4 p.m., in a statement posted to Twitter, Richer apologized for the machine errors and reiterated his commitment to assisting voters. The statement immediately garnered hundreds of replies. A few thanked Richer for his transparency. But many just used one word, in all caps: “RESIGN.”
There was always a decent chance that Election Night in Maricopa County would culminate, once again, in angry protests outside the county recorder’s office and shrill allegations of coordinated fraud. Now, whether Republicans win big tonight or not, that outcome seems likelier than ever.
Some vote-counting machines in Arizona’s Maricopa County malfunctioned on Election Day, leading state Republican leaders to spread unsubstantiated claims of fraud and offer contradictory advice to voters, with the state’s GOP chair Kelli Ward claiming without evidence that voters who follow county officials’ advice would essentially be letting someone else “decide how you voted.”
A voting tabulator glitch in Arizona’s Maricopa County has GOP officials claiming voter fraud, … [+] although local Republican officials say it’s just a technical error.
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Key Facts
Tabulators in roughly 20% of Maricopa County’s polling places are struggling to read some ballots, according to county Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates (R), who called the situation a “technical issue” in a press conference Tuesday afternoon, adding “none of this indicates any fraud.”
If a tabulator isn’t working, the county encouraged voters to place their ballots into a secure box marked “3,” and their votes will be tabulated in the evening at a central counting center.
However, in an interview Tuesday with former President Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Ward claimed voters who follow Maricopa County officials’ advice by submitting ballots into the secure box are sending their votes to “digital adjudication,” and urged voters to ignore the county’s guidance if at all possible.
Ward tweeted her own advice on Tuesday, telling voters to stay in line and request to use another machine called an accessible voting device, claiming voters who check into a polling place are stuck “like a prisoner” and can’t vote at another location—the county’s election department, however, denied that claim, saying voters have the option of checking out, turning in their ballot and going to another of the county’s polling sites.
In a tweet, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—who, like Ward, has repeatedly spread the false conspiracy that the 2020 election was stolen—also urged voters to ask for an accessible voting machine or wait until a tabulator starts working again, but differed from Ward in her advice for voters who “can’t wait,” advising them to put their ballots into box 3.
Trump-backed Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters retweeted a post urging voters not to leave their polling place for a new one if their votes aren’t counted, while Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social “don’t get out of line until you cast your vote,” claiming “they are trying to steal the election with bad machines and DELAY.”
Key Background
The baseless allegations of voter fraud come after months of debunked vote-rigging theories were spread by many GOP leaders, including 202 Republican congressional candidates who believe the 2020 election was either flawed or based on fraud, according to data from the Brookings Institution. A Gallup poll released last week found three in five Republicans believe votes in the midterms will be cast and counted inaccurately, compared to just 15% of Democrats. Nearly 40% of Republicans said they would blame voter fraud if the GOP doesn’t take control of Congress, including 19% who said it’s “highly likely” Republicans would lose because of fraud, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll released last month. In Maricopa County, misinformation claims “really kicked into high gear” last week, Gates said, although there have been numerous unsubstantiated allegations of fraud since the 2020 elections, leading to a 2021 audit of tabulators. Meanwhile, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs—the Democratic candidate for governor—is investigating numerous reports of voter intimidation.
Surprising Fact
Maricopa County, a traditionally Republican-leaning county that includes Phoenix, Glendale, Mesa and Scottsdale, is not only Arizona’s most populous county, but it’s also run by Republicans, including Gates. Election workers in the county have faced more than 100 violent threats and intimidation ahead of the election, including emails, social media posts and threats of posting photos of election workers, Reuters reported.
