Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who is currently suing drag-hating MAGA queen Kari Lake for defamation (more on that in a moment), offered a master class this week in how to shut down a crazed election denier in a single tweet.
Yesterday, Richer took a moment to personally respond to an extreme right-wing activist who questioned mail-in voting in Arizona ahead of the state’s primaries next month.
Aubrey Savela is a field representative for the extreme right-wing nonprofit Turning Point Action who regularly tweets and retweets about god, guns, and groomers. She’s also a huge Donald Trump and Kari Lake supporter.
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Earlier this week, she leaned into Lake’s false claims that the elections in Arizona, and Maricopa county in particularly, are being run fraudulently by sharing a photo on social media of two mail-in ballots she received.
“Maricopa county at its finest… My first time ever voting in a presidential preference election and I received not one but two mail-in ballots. Thank you @stephen_richer,” she tweeted.
Maricopa county at its finest…
My first time ever voting in a presidential preference election and I received not one but two mail-in ballots ?
Richer, who is a Republican BTW, wasted no time in explaining to Savela why she received two ballots and how exactly mail-in voting works.
“Hi Aubrey! Thanks for reaching out,” he responded. “You changed your voter registration on the last day of voter registration (Feb. 20) from your Chandler address to your new Tempe address.”
He continued, “Because early ballots must go out on Feb. 21, your Chandler ballot was already set to go out, and so it did. Then we sent out a new ballot to your Tempe address when we processed your voter registration modification. That’s why you had to redact out different lengths in the address (because they were sent to different addresses).”
He further explained, “You’ll also notice that one of packet codes ends in ’01’ (the one to your old address) and one ends in ’02’ (the one sent to your new address). As soon as the ’02’ one goes out, the ’01’ packet is dead. Meaning even if you sent it back, it wouldn’t proceed to signature verification, and it wouldn’t be opened. That’s how we prevent people from voting twice.”
“Hope this helps! Have a great night! Happy voting!”
Hi Aubrey!
Thanks for reaching out.
You changed your voter registration on the last day of voter registration (Feb. 20) from your Chandler address to your new Tempe address.
Because early ballots must go out on Feb. 21, your Chandler ballot was already set to go out, and…— Stephen Richer—MaricopaCountyRecorder (prsnl acct) (@stephen_richer) February 29, 2024
Richer’s reply to Savela’s tweet received an overwhelming praise from others.
“This Richer guy is an assassin,” one person tweeted. “I’m hiring him to tweet all my ex boyfriends.”
“I’d like to report a murder,” another said.
“This was exquisitely brutal,” someone else commented.
“Congratulations on your victory tonight sir,” another added.
Clearly, Richer is not one to suffer fools, as evidenced by his response to Savela and his defamation lawsuit against Lake, which should soon be going to trial.
He filed the lawsuit last year after she wouldn’t quit falsely accusing him of being a criminal and saying he “sabotaged” electronic ballot printers and inserted 300,000 fake ballots into the Maricopa County ballot count, thus costing her the governorship in 2022.
In reality, Richer didn’t do anything wrong. Lake simply lost the election fair and square to Democrat Katie Hobbs by 17,000 votes. But as a result of her endless lies about him, Richer has faced months of harassment and even received death threats.
“She’s allowed to insult me, criticize my abilities, criticize my hair,” he told reporters. “She is not allowed to say that I did something that was criminally unlawful, something that has been adjudicated by multiple courts as absolutely, positively not happening.”
Lake has tried twice to get the case dismissed. Both times she has failed. Just last month, a judge has ruled her claims about Richer could be proved false to a jury and greenlit the case for trial.
Of course, everyone else has known this for years.
Last week, in an appearance on Real America’s Voice, she implied Richer was suing her in an effort to shut down her current bid for U.S. Senate. Never mind the fact that he filed the suit several months before she announced her candidacy.
“I wish I could sit here and tell you everything’s fine and dandy,” Lake said. “It’s not. But I do know this, they’re trying to bring down President Trump. They’re trying to sue me into oblivion for speaking about elections.”
But in a separate interview with local radio station KTAR News 92.3 FM last week, she accidentally admitted that her claims about Richer and election fraud aren’t actually based in fact.
“I don’t know who exactly stole the election,” Lake confessed, before quickly adding, “But there are a lot of people who are running elections poorly, and we’ve seen the results.”
Lake is currently running for U.S. Senate in Arizona against pro-LGBTQ+ Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who has been outraising her by millions of dollars. Meanwhile, incumbent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, has yet to announce whether she’ll seek another term in office.
The latest batch of polls from Emerson College find Lake six points behind Gallego. Meanwhile, Sinema is trailing Lake by 10 points and Gallego by 15 points.
Sinema has until April 1 to register for reelection but has remained tight-lipped about her plans. If she does decide to run, she’ll almost certainly lose and it could end up tipping the race to Lake.
