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.”
Slipstream
Republican officials said he lost. They wanted him to win, but the votes didn't go that way, so they were honest and told the truth. When Republican officials are worried about what their own president is doing, we know there's something fishy with the president's actions.
Evangel
True. Why can't other people see that?
Well Street
I've watched interviews with historians detailing how many actions of the president and Steven Miller are from the playbook of autocrats. This includes sowing seeds of distrust in the election process and any unfavorable results.
I'm hopeful that as more voters on the right cry foul over the Epstein saga, they'll grow distrustful and suspicious of everything the administration says.
Evangel
In politics, they always remind the candidates to "be in it to win it." That translates into doing whatever it takes to win, including cheat. All parties over the last 2.5 centuries have been guilty of this. Richard Nixon's nickname was Tricky Dick. Both parties over the last 40 years found ways to get around campaign reform laws that forbade donations over a given amount, solely for the purpose of reducing special interest monies and corporate influence in decision making.
So, what's the solution? Citizens on both sides of the aisle need to recognize that corrupt practices are baked into the system. They're an acceptable part of the overall "game"—at least to those who hold office.
When we allow politics to be run like a game, it attracts players whose sole goal is to win. That's what we're dealing with. It's why no one in office makes much effort to work together to solve the existential social and economic problems of our time. It's never going to be about what you want. It will always be about what the highest bidders in industry want. Once we accept that truth and stop hating and blaming those on the other side of the aisle, things might change. Until then, things will proceed on course, wrecking what's left of the social and economic values we once all held sacred.