AMNA NAWAZ: In Arizona yesterday, three prominent election deniers won their Republican primaries for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.

If they win in November, they will play key roles in overseeing elections and defending voting laws.

Arizona is one of many states where candidates who denied or questioned the 2020 election results are on the ballot.

For more on this, we're joined by Stephen Richer.

He was the Republican elections recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, from 2021 to 2025.

He's now a senior fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

Stephen, welcome back to the "News Hour."

Thanks for joining us.

STEPHEN RICHER (R), Former Maricopa County, Arizona, Recorder: Thank you.

And we're still talking about the same things, it seems.

AMNA NAWAZ: Here we are.

Well, listen, three election deniers in Arizona last night all played a role in the efforts to try to overturn those 2020 election results.

That was the one in which President Trump lost the election.

They all won their primaries last night.

What do you take away from that?

What does that say to you?

STEPHEN RICHER: Yes, these weren't just people who casually believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election or at least mention it in passing.

These were people who were integral to January 6, as Andy Biggs was, who filed the Kraken lawsuit in the state of Arizona, as Alex Kolodin did, and who oversaw the Cyber Ninjas audit in 2021, as Warren Petersen, the A.G.

candidate, did.

So these are leaders in the movement, and it's reflective of the fact that the Arizona primary, Republican primary base, is still in the raptures of election denialism, and it's still a requirement here to win in a primary.

AMNA NAWAZ: The primaries are one thing.

The general is another.

When you look back at election deniers and how they fared in past elections, in 2022 and 2024, they almost universally lost in those general election races.

Do you have any reason to believe that 2026 is going to be different?

STEPHEN RICHER: I think those people would say, look at President Trump in 2024.

He overcame -- obviously, he was the election denier in chief, and he won Arizona in 2024.

And so they would say, we're now so much better than the Democrats on the issues that, even if not everyone loves this, then we're going to win in 2026.

I still think it's a net negative for them.

And that played out in 2022, certainly.

And it played out to an extent in 2024.

AMNA NAWAZ: We know that this kind of rhetoric though, repeating the lies about the 2020 election, it has real-world implications.

So if there are more people or even a consistent number of people who continue to believe that, how does that impact our election security, how people choose to participate in it, or what they tolerate at election sites?

STEPHEN RICHER: It's so easy to dismiss this as simply a political game.

Oh, well, politicians lie, they all say.

But this has real-world downstream effects, the very least of which is that a lot of people won't have confidence in our elections.

And that, at the minimum, is simply sad.

But, more importantly, it means that there will be confrontations at voting locations.

It means that it will be harder to recruit polling workers.

Or the worst is that it will translate into threats of violence or actual violence.

In Maricopa County, we had to invest millions of dollars into security over the last few years and during the 2024 cycle because of all of the nonsense that flowed out from these election deniers.

AMNA NAWAZ: While I have you, Stephen, I want to ask you about some news we reported this week out of New Jersey, where Governor Mikie Sherrill announced yesterday that more than 6,000 people had been accidentally registered to vote in New Jersey, despite declaring to the DMV that they were not citizens.

About 400 of them actually ended up voting.

President Trump has been talking about this.

He posted that news this morning and called it evidence of what he called a crooked election system.

How do you look at this from your perspective?

STEPHEN RICHER: It's not good, but let's be honest about what it is, is, it is a software glitch.

It is not a bunch of noncitizens who are trying to unlawfully circumvent the controls of the process.

In fact, those people all said that they were not citizens, and yet the software moved them over into the citizenship category.

And so I don't think it fits into what President Trump is currently saying.

However, it is disappointing, and it's even more disappointing that, according to the governor, this was simply buried for two years, and we're only hearing about it now.

And so I hope that the governor produces more information about how they discovered this, what was previously done, and what's going to be done moving forward to make sure that we continue to keep noncitizens voting in our elections to a very, very, very, very small number.

AMNA NAWAZ: Just to back this up a little bit, I want to remind people here, you know what it was like to have to stand up to pressure from the president and others as an election official back in 2020.

It took individual people refusing to give in to political pressure to try to change or overturn election results.

When you look at the system and where it is now, are you confident those individual people will be in those positions to stand up to pressure if it's there in 2026 or 2028?

STEPHEN RICHER: You know, 10 years ago, I would have hoped that most people had a line in the sand and that the well-being of American democracy was a line in the sand for any politician.

I think it's the distinct minority.

And I think those people who raise their head, who held that line in the sand in 2020 and 2022 and in 2024, fewer and fewer of them, at least on my side, on the Republican side, are in office.

And that's just -- that's a real shame, and it could potentially have some negative consequences.

AMNA NAWAZ: Stephen Richer, now at Harvard University's Kennedy School, always good to have you and your perspective.

Thank you so much.

STEPHEN RICHER: Thank you.