An Arizona election official has been forced into hiding after receiving death threats for his handling of the 2022 midterm elections.
Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates, a lifelong Republican, confirmed to a local television station that he has been moved to an “undisclosed location” and assigned a security detail following a volatile election cycle in which a majority of former President Donald Trump-backed candidates centered their campaigns on unfounded claims that a mass fraud had been perpetrated on Arizonans and that their votes were not counted.
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Chief among those election deniers is Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who lost her race to Democratic challenger Katie Hobbs but has yet to concede. In fact, the former television news anchor, once a card-carrying Democrat but now a MAGA megastar, has claimed her defeat was the result of the “disenfranchisement” of her supporters in Maricopa County.
Lake, who has recently been seen with the ex-president, claims the election was compromised and that “the appropriate thing to do would be to let Maricopa County cast their votes again.”
Lake has pointed to technical issues in Arizona’s most populous county that led to delays and confusion — and has given birth to a new round of election conspiracy theories. Her campaign has been posting video testimonials from supporters who claim they ran into issues. However, most of those same supporters admitted they were able to cast their ballots in the end.
Maricopa County officials said that all voters who went to polling places to cast ballots in person on Nov. 8, Election Day, were given the opportunity to vote, despite claims from Lake’s campaign that seemed to suggest otherwise.
Lake’s campaign spokeswoman Caroline Wren told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast last week that the issues in Maricopa County are the result of “either total incompetence or malice.”
On the campaign trail, Lake refused to say whether she would accept the results of the election if she lost, instead telling multiple news outlets, including the Washington Examiner, that she would accept the results when she won.
Gates first came under fire from Trump and his allies in 2020.
The Harvard Law School graduate served as secretary of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, leader of GOP election integrity efforts, and a member of the Phoenix City Council from 2009-2016. He was elected to the Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County in 2016 and has been chairman since 2019.
After the Board of Supervisors, made up of four Republicans and one Democrat, voted unanimously to certify the election in favor of Biden, he and other Arizona election officials faced threats of violence.
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“Do we really expect members of the Board of Supervisors to be subjected to death threats?” he said at the time. “It’s not really what you sign up for.”
Arizona is scheduled to certify its election results on Dec. 5.
