Nearly six years have passed since President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, when a swath of Arizona Republicans unleashed a torrent of election conspiracy theories on America in an attempt to reverse the results of that contest.
For years, many continued to fan the flame. But now, those Republicans running for office suddenly want nothing more than for the public to forget about their roles in election conspiracy nonsense dating back as far as Trump’s loss.
And yet, it continues to haunt them relentlessly.
Following Monday night’s debate between Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and GOP challenger Rep. Alex Kolodin, members of the press swarmed Kolodin as he hastened to get out of the building.
Before serving at the Legislature, Kolodin’s main claim to fame was challenging the 2020 elections in the infamous “kraken” lawsuit, which was rejected by two courts and for which he was sanctioned by the State Bar of Arizona after making claims of widespread election fraud without providing any evidence. He had to pay fines and take attorney ethics courses.
On Monday, those reporters wanted to know whether he thought Trump won Arizona in 2020.
“Look, Joe Biden was the president. Congress said that Joe Biden won — Congress called the race,” the lawyer said, though he declined to say whether he trusted the 2020 count. “He won, he was president. It’s six years later. The voters of Arizona want to focus on who’s gonna do the best job for them.”
Just after the July primary, that evasive line became the canned talking point for many Republicans hoping to avoid contradicting their previous election conspiracy fervor and instead focus on more current, advantageous issues.
Several of them have been in the spotlight for years — like GOP gubernatorial nominee and Congressman Andy Biggs, who voted in Congress to overturn Arizona's 2020 presidential election — but some are new to running for office.
Today, we’re going to introduce you to a few of those newbie candidates.
And in researching this story, we noticed something worth noting: involvement in the “election integrity” movement is truly a spectrum. Testifying in court about one’s election experience does not denote the same level of participation in casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process as does involvement in the January 6 insurrection.
But in the larger picture, the actors all play some role.
Meet the newest cohort of Republicans with election denialism bona fides — or who just have eye-raising links to the movement.
James Rogers — East Mesa’s LD10
Perhaps the most prolific of the candidates, James Rogers is still working alongside some of the nation’s top election deniers. And he’s not trying to run away from his own dubious history of casting doubt on Arizona elections.
The attorney, who won a GOP primary race in East Mesa’s deep-red Legislative District 10, has worked extensively with America First Legal — a law firm founded by Trump’s most notorious and extreme advisor, Stephen Miller.
No, we didn’t create this image. It’s the first thing you see on his campaign website.
In particular, Rogers was behind a 2024 America First Legal lawsuit that alleged Maricopa, Yavapai and Coconino counties broke the law by using drop boxes in 2022 and said there was “near-certainty” that the 2024 election would also be tainted by fraud.
And hilariously, he cited Kari Lake’s lawsuit that claimed widespread fraud in the 2022 election — which was soundly rejected by several Arizona courts.
“Election day on November 8, 2022 in Maricopa County was marred by ‘widespread failures’ and ‘technical problems’ that led to ‘the anger and frustration of voters who were subjected to inconvenience and confusion at voter centers,’” Rogers wrote in the lawsuit, with the quotes coming from the Lake lawsuit.
His website also claims that if elected, he will be “the only Representative with the specialized knowledge of election law to craft the reforms we need.”
The word “specialized” is doing a lot of lifting here. Perhaps he meant “special.”
Paul Carver — North Phoenix’s LD2
Up in the swing district of North Phoenix’s Legislative District 2, Paul Carver is seeking to join GOP Rep. Justin Wilmeth on the House floor and knock Democratic Rep. Stephanie Simacek out of her seat.
He’s currently on the governing board of the Deer Valley Unified School District, but he also carries baggage from a history of moving among extremist circles. From 2021 to 2022, he was a leader in the Arizona state chapter of the paramilitary organization Union of Three Percenter American Patriots, whose members were involved in the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist march, the 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque and the January 6 insurrection.
He later tried to distance himself from the group.
Carver also deleted a Facebook post suggesting he was at the Capitol for the insurrection, saying there “was no insurrection.”
Luckily, the receipts are saved online.
Carver’s website does not make mention of election integrity or reform — or, for that matter, his leadership in the Three Percenters.
Bradley Bettencourt — West Mesa’s LD9
Running against Democrats Rep. Lorena Austin and first-time candidate Jacob Martinez in a swing district, Republican Bradley Bettencourt probably doesn’t want anyone to bring up elections.
His campaign website lists 10 key issues he’s focused on — and none of them are related to voting.
Back in December 2022, Bettencourt was a sworn witness for Lake’s legal team as Arizona’s queen of election conspiracies attempted to overturn her loss to now-Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Bettencourt, who may or may not have inspired the look for Joaquin Phoenix’s “The Joker” character, at the December 2022 trial in Kari Lake’s election fraud case
Bettencourt worked for Maricopa County in the 2022 general election as a “T-tech,” providing technical support and troubleshooting equipment at a voting center.
In fairness, his testimony wasn’t particularly divisive or outrageous — but ultimately, it did serve to help Lake and her team cast doubt on the election.
“It felt a bit chaotic. I had people from the other places I’ve lived reaching out and saying, ‘What’s going on in Maricopa County?’” Bettencourt said in court. “At our place, there was a line outside the door all day. We had less problems than a lot of other places.”
He told the court that his team managed to solve problems with technology by shaking ink cartridges when the ink wouldn’t print, cleaning corona wires, and calling a troubleshooter to clean the tabulators, which weren’t taking clean prints at times.
It wasn’t exactly a total dispersion of doubt on the process. While Democrats would certainly love to blast Bettencourt for helping out Lake, he never made any wild statements about fraud or bombastically threw doubt on the results — publicly, at least.
Bettencourt told us he was motivated to testify for Lake because he “wanted to ensure elections run smoothly and it shouldn’t take 1-2 weeks to receive results,” though he didn’t discuss the wait time while in court. He also said that recent work by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, as evident to him in July’s primary elections results, has improved the process.
Campaign finance records show that Bettencourt has also paid at least $5,000 to McShane LLC, a consulting firm with links to the extremist group Proud Boys that was hired by Nevada Republicans to investigate fraud in the 2020 election. He told us he hired the firm as his “strategic consultants.”
Well, that’s a bit strange. But it’s not like he voted against certifying 2020’s election results.
The good voters of Legislative District 9 will have to decide what to make of it.
Our campaign finance laws suck: After getting in trouble for not disclosing who paid for her inauguration, Gov. Katie Hobbs says it’s not the public’s business who is paying the lawyers defending her in the Sunshine Residential “pay-to-play” scheme, per Capitol scribe Howie Fischer. Hobbs plans to keep collecting money for her legal fund even after the Sunshine probe is finished, in case her reelection campaign leads to litigation. But thanks to a 2016 state law, she’s not required to say who is paying for her legal help.
“I have gone above and beyond in being transparent,” Hobbs said.
Who saw this one coming?: The Arizona Green Party is asking Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to remove the party’s top statewide candidates from the November ballot, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports, because those candidates are actually “sham” candidates with deep GOP ties. As our reporting pointed out in April, the Arizona Green Party has struggled to stop grifters from infiltrating its ballot line in elections. Fontes said there’s nothing he can do to kick Green gubernatorial candidate Risa Lombardo or secretary of state nominee Duwayne Collier off the ballot.
Everybody’s a border expert now: Arizona voters are going to decide whether drug cartels are terrorists, which, unsurprisingly, could lead to a whole lot of non-terrorists getting swept up, the Arizona Mirror’s Gloria Rebecca Gomez reports. If voters sign off on Prop 317, critics worry that asylum seekers will get labeled as terrorists, in keeping with the Trump administration’s “invasion” rhetoric. Meanwhile, Hobbs and her Republican opponent, Congressman Andy Biggs, are arguing over what to do with the Border Strike Force that former Gov. Doug Ducey created and then Hobbs dismantled, Manuelita Beck reports for ABC15. Biggs is making the strike force’s resurrection a top priority, while Hobbs says the money is being spent better by local law enforcement.
The case of the shrinking apartments: On average, new apartments in Phoenix became smaller in the past decade while most renters came to pay a lot more across the city, Axios reports. While the average apartment rented for about $1,000 in Phoenix 10 years ago, now it goes for $1,727 — a 24% increase when adjusted for inflation.
Quiet, a water guru is speaking: Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke outlined some of the implications of cuts to Arizona’s Colorado River allocation in an interview with KJZZ’s Mark Brodie, noting that the 760,000 acre-feet “would almost all come out of the Central Arizona Project.” Among his other notable statements: California legally didn’t have to agree to any cuts, yet it did; Arizona is prepared to deal with the reductions; and there is a fair amount of risk in future federal decisions after 2029, when western Arizona cities north of Yuma could lose their water supplies from the river.
Most of Arizona’s political press corps is hung up on Arizona’s sexiest 2026 races — Gov. Katie Hobbs vs Andy Biggs, and the like.
But KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez is doing the Lord’s work by digging1 into the often-overlooked position of Arizona mine inspector.
And unlike the rest of the scattered coverage of the race, which focuses on boring issues that voters have no real opinions about, like mine safety, Sanchez is asking the probing questions that voters (read: Agenda reporters) really wanna know.
(For you readers who didn’t grow up here, the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine was allegedly first discovered by the Peralta family from Mexico, but they were supposedly murdered while transporting their haul. The Dutchman, Jacob Waltz, allegedly rediscovered it years later and never revealed the location of the mine.)
The Democratic challenger, Brian Matlock, dodged this pressing question, noting that he named his dog Dutch for a reason — yet he refused to comment on what that reason was.
The Republican incumbent, Walter "Les" Presmyk, offered his own unsubstantiated theory that the Dutchman was actually stealing gold from the Vulture Mine, where he worked, and laundering it by claiming he had found the Peralta mine.
“I’m not saying that the legends and lore about the Peralta gold are not true, but I'm not sure that Jacob Waltz was digging gold in the Superstitions. I think he was high-grading (stealing), but that’s my opinion,” Presmyk said.
Yet, despite the seeming admission by both candidates that there is, indeed, gold in them there hills, “Neither of the candidates for mine inspector committed to dedicating any state resources to hunting for the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine,” Sanchez notes.
1 Yes that was an intentional pun. We apologize.