Notable Quotable: Stephen Richer On 2026 Elections

As we enter another season of electioneering leading into the 2026 midterms, Stephen Richer, the former Republican Recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, shares his concerns about this administration’s renewed false claims of election interference.

“I think that we’ll have to deal with more of what we dealt with over the past four years, which is lies and conspiracies about how elections are administered in the United States. And, I, as well as many other election officials throughout, have been doing our very best to teach Americans about how elections work.

“So we talk about foreign interference, for instance. President Trump reinvoked the notion that Italian spy satellites somehow interfered with the 2020 election. But then we tell people, well, in 98% of jurisdictions in the United States, we have paper ballots, as was in the case in Georgia in 2020—and paper ballots are excellent, because you can't hack paper ballots.

“And so the difference this time is that a lot of these allegations and conspiracies will be coming from within the government. And the only thing I don't know is to what end? Is it just to create doubt, or is it a pretext for something different, something more aggressive? Already we've seen actions from the federal government that we've never seen before. I don't know what else is coming.”