Death threats get Republicans to fall in line
... In early 2021, (Stephen) Richer was an Arizona Republican official who regularly attended local party events. At the time, he was the newly elected county recorder of Maricopa County. The job was a new level of prominence — he was now the most important election supervisory official in the state’s largest county — but going to Arizona Republican events was routine: the kind of thing that Richer, like any state politician, had done hundreds of times before.
But at one event, the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?
... Many of the Republican faithful had recently decided that Maricopa County had been the epicenter of “the steal,” Joe Biden’s theft of Arizona from Donald Trump — and the entire presidential election with it ... Richer tried to tell them it wasn’t true, hoping his long track record in the state Republican party would give him some credibility ...
The more he tried to convince people that the 2020 results were legitimate, the more hostile the audience became — and not just at this one event. He recalls people at Republican meetings getting in his face, grabbing him, and even banging on his car windshield in the parking lot ...
By 2022, when Richer was presiding over the November election’s ballot tally, his office was fortified like a military base: surrounded by armed police deployed to protect him and his staff from threats ... When we spoke, he was about to testify in one of three federal cases against people who had vowed to kill him ...
https://www.vox.com/23899688/2024-election-republican-primary-death-threats-trump
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