A rural Arizona county where leaders have embraced voting machine conspiracies on Tuesday hired an election director who has promoted false claims that voter fraud cost former President Donald Trump his re-election in 2020.
The two Republicans on the three-member Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted to hire Bob Bartelsmeyer, who shared memes on his personal Facebook page supporting Trump’s fraud claims and promoting the lie that voting machines of Dominion manipulated the result.
Last week, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to settle a defamation case after the network repeatedly broadcast las false claims of voting machines after the 2020 election.
The hiring of Bartelsmeyer is the latest controversial decision by the conservative majority in the southeastern Arizona county of 125,000, which voted for Trump over Joe Biden in 2020 by nearly 20 percentage points. The two Republicans on the board, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, tried to have ballots counted by hand in last year’s midterm elections, which a judge said was illegal. They then refused to certify the election results, forcing a judge to intervene again.
Bartelsmeyer, who was previously the director of elections in a smaller Arizona county, replaces Lisa Marra, a respected director of elections before she recently stepped down from her nonpartisan position after five years. Marra had refused to do the manual count because it was illegal.
After Marra resigned, Republicans on the board voted to hand over his duties to Registrar David Stevens, an elected Republican, sparking a demand of the attorney general.
Stevens said Bartelsmeyer was the only person among the three applicants with experience managing elections.
Arizona, a presidential swing state where 11 electoral votes and one US Senate seat could be decided by a fraction of a percentage point, has been at the center of electoral conspiracies since 2020. Trump and his allies focused much of their efforts to undo his defeat. in Arizona. A partisan ballot review on behalf of next year’s legislative Republicans confirmed Biden’s victory but raised other unsubstantiated claims of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Republican Kari Lake keep fighting against his defeat in last year’s gubernatorial race in the judicial system.
Bartelsmeyer has served for the past year as director of elections and deputy clerk in La Paz County on Arizona’s western border. The job is preceded by an unexplained 12-year gap in his resume. Before that, his resume shows that he jumped between polling jobs in Arizona, New Mexico and Florida, and was a clerk-elect in Lawrence County, Missouri, for 23 years.
He posted prolifically on his Facebook page about conspiracies in the months after Trump’s loss, sharing memes and reviews of his lawyers’ implausible legal claims. Some were flagged as misleading by Facebook.
“Join me by posting: ‘Trump legally won in a landslide,’” read a post he shared on December 20, 2020.
“We must demand electoral integrity and transparency in the 2020 election for America to survive as a democracy and for the America we know and love!” Bartelsmeyer wrote on December 6, 2020.
He said he was not working on the elections at the time.
“As a private citizen between 2016 and 2021, I have the freedom to express my opinion,” he told the board.
Biden’s victory has been confirmed in multiple reviews , counts y audits in the key states where Trump contested his defeat, and the fraud claims made by Trump and his allies have been rejected by members of his own administration are exfiscal general And through dozens of court cases , including those supervised by judges appointed by him. there hasn’t been evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 elections.
Bartelsmeyer defended his qualifications, citing three decades of experience working in elections and saying he wants transparency and integrity. He said he supports the use of vote-counting machines, but wants confirmation that they are accurate.
“I’m not against machines,” Bartelsmeyer said. “I am in favor of machines. I think they are 99.9% accurate. But I do want a manual count to compare against the machine count to make sure everything is correct.”
Ann English, the only Democrat on the board, said she did not know about the plans to hire Bartelsmeyer until the decision appeared on the meeting’s agenda. She asked Stevens if she thought the Facebook posts were concerning and if it was a “red flag” that Bartelsmeyer’s application requested that several of his previous employers not be contacted.
Meanwhile, spurred on by recent county ballot movements, critics of the Crosby district are collecting signatures in hopes of forcing a recall vote against it.
Votebeat first reported on the county’s plans to hire Bartelsmeyer and his online publications. Half a dozen Cochise County residents urged the board not to hire Bartelsmeyer.
“Vote no on hiring this election denying crazy work,” Jeff Sturges of Sierra Vista, the county’s largest city, urged the board before Bartelsmeyer passed.
2023-04-26 14:37:25
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