Not MAGA enough: 2020 election skeptic quit his job after facing blowback from angry election deniers
By Rob Kuznia, Scott Bronstein and Donie O'Sullivan, CNN
11 minute read
Updated 2:12 PM EST, Fri January 12, 2024
When Bob Bartelsmeyer accepted the job as the elections director of a sprawling rural county in Arizona last spring, it seemed like the perfect move. It was a step up professionally in a place where the Trumpian values of the community matched his own.
After all, Bartelsmeyer, 67, believed the falsehood subscribed to by millions of MAGA Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.
But instead of getting a warm reception, Bartelsmeyer got a wakeup call: Not even he – whose social media posts promoted Trump’s claims of election fraud, was equipped to handle the extreme level of distrust in elections felt by residents in this county, which had become an unsettling case study in how democracy in an American county can break down.
Bartelsmeyer’s tenure in Cochise County, Arizona, lasted all of five months, and overlapped with a string of events that preceded his arrival and has kept swirling after his September departure. This has included the harassment of election officials by local election deniers and conspiracists, the refusal of an elected board to certify the 2022 midterm election, the criminal indictment of two GOP board members for their recalcitrance and the near disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters.
In his first national interview about the mess, Bartelsmeyer told CNN he fears the weakened democracy in this rugged county on the Mexican border is an indicator of where much of America is headed on elections.
“I have worries about the nation,” he said. “2024 is going to be very brutal. Going to be very hostile.”
Cochise County Recorder's Office in Bisbee, Arizona.
CNN
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Bartelsmeyer – who was not working as an election official at the time – posted memes and commentary on social media about how Trump was the true victor.
“Trump legally won by a landslide,” declared one meme that he reposted.
These posts from Bartelsmeyer have been removed, even though he still seems unable to fully shake his doubt about the 2020 election. The skepticism he voiced online drew scrutiny from critics and even made international headlines in April, when he was given the top election job in Cochise. What came next was a head-scratcher. Bartelsmeyer, who had previously been the election director in Arizona’s much smaller La Paz County, ran into a buzzsaw of opposition to his actions and proposals.
These included measures such as holding mail-only elections for special districts and continuing a yearslong practice of replacing neighborhood polling places with vote centers that enable people to cast ballots from anywhere in the county.
To Bartelsmeyer, they were common-sense moves that followed the law, made it easier to vote, saved money and were in line with regional and national election trends. What’s more, they were practices the county had already enacted in prior years without controversy. But to the dozen or so vocal detractors who showed up to Cochise Board of Supervisor meetings, they smacked of the kind of voting policies that aroused their suspicion that Trump was robbed in 2020.
In short, to them, their new MAGA elections director was not MAGA enough.
“After hearing that nightmarish thing from Mr. Bartelsmeyer – I was appalled by it, actually,” said one resident at the September board meeting where Bartelsmeyer recommended the voting centers. “To claim that he’s a conservative – you don’t need to claim it, it’s by your actions. And your actions, sir, are not that of a conservative, otherwise you’d be listening to your constituents.”
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“Mr. Bartelsmeyer, if I had the authority, I’d fire you,” said another resident.
The critics tended to be light on specifics and heavy on suspicion when articulating their opposition. In general, they wanted to turn the clock back to a time when people showed up in person to an assigned neighborhood precinct to cast a ballot on paper that would be counted by hand. Some pointed out that most people in France still vote in this way. (However, that country also makes it easier to get to the polls by holding elections on Sundays.)
“I believe that if we continue to take these easy choices, and we go down this path of least resistance in the name of convenience, it’s not going to be too long before every vote is by mail,” said an attendee at the September meeting. “And then it’s not going to be too long til every vote is online. And then it’s going to be not too long until there’s no voting at all.”
“The reason we didn’t speak up when they put in these voting centers and things and vote by mail is because we were asleep at the wheel; now we’re awake,” said another. “You woke up a sleeping giant.”
One citizen believed that voting centers would somehow open the county’s election to “vulnerability so that (Meta founder Mark) Zuckerberg and those type of tech titans have a view into Cochise County.”
To top it off, the board ultimately voted to strike down Bartelsmeyer’s voting center proposal.
Bartelsmeyer told CNN the experience as election director in Cochise was “awful.”
“I’ve been ridiculed, disrupted and intimidated,” he said. “My reputation and ethics have been called into question. And I could not continue to work in an environment like that.”
Fed up with it all, Bartelsmeyer – who said the stress of the job exacerbated a health concern – resigned in September and returned to his former post as elections director in La Paz County.
Amid exodus of election officials, Bartelsmeyer’s story stands out
Bartelsmeyer is among hundreds of election officials or workers across the country who have left their jobs in recent years, according to several national voting rights groups, raising concerns about the upcoming presidential election. In polls and news articles, election workers say they’ve faced unprecedented hostility in the form of harassment and threats.
The strife – and resulting exodus – has been especially pitched in the American West and in battleground states such as Georgia and Michigan. Across 11 western states, more than 160 top local election officials have left their positions since November 2020, according to a recent report by Issue One, a nonprofit election watchdog group. In Arizona alone, at least a dozen of the state’s 15 county election chiefs have departed since the 2020 election, according to the report.
They include Geri Roll, the former election director in Pinal County who says top local Republican officials falsely accused her of all manner of wrongdoing, from not counting ballots to changing votes.
“It was so toxic, I had to resign,” said Roll, an attorney – and former registered Republican – who has worked as an assistant attorney general for Arizona and a county prosecutor. “I have dealt with defendants who are rapists, murderers, child molesters. Their correspondence was far more respectful than anything I saw on elections.”
Geri Roll, the former election director in Pinal County, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. She says conspiracy theories about elections are “nonsensical.”
CNN
