GOP leaders Under RightCount’s Banner Join Forces to Renew Faith in Elections

Arizona Capitol Times | October 10, 2024
By Kiera Riley

 The Arizona Capitol Times is out with a new reporting spotlighting RightCount’s continued recruitment success in Arizona. Veterans, former GOP party officials, small business owners and faith leaders join the growing coalition looking to build trust in the 2024 elections. 

After a legislative district, county and state Republican party chair watched election distrust seep into the party, the three sought to rebuild lost faith in the system.

With the 2024 election just weeks away, trust in elections among Republican voters looms large, leading the former Legislative District 4 Chair Kathy Petsas, former Pima County Chair David Eppihimer and former Arizona Republican Party Chair Robert Graham to join RightCount in hopes to suture up cuts to trust in the election systems among their own. The organization aims to shore up trust in state elections,

“The minute all of this conspiratorial stuff started becoming the norm and people were professing it as though it were fact, as if it were truth, our party complexion completely changed and the grassroots changed,” Petsas said. “What we’re trying to do is educate the grassroots, who ought to know better.”

***

RightCount formed with that distrust in mind. The national organization, operating in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, seeks to educate the public on political systems, voting safeguards and election officials ahead of the 2024 presidential election. It plans to recruit and assemble local civil, business, veteran and faith leaders.

In September, RightCount Arizona launched its leadership advisory committee, chaired by former Governor Jan Brewer.

Petsas, Eppihimer and Graham were chosen to serve, alongside former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, former congressional staff member and county elections employee Marcus Milam, LDS faith leader Jane Andersen, former Phoenix city councilman Braden Biggs, former GOP committee chairman Paul Cummings, and veterans Josh Stanwitz and Amanda Tallman.

As Petsas, Eppihimer and Graham prepare for the 2024 election as RightCount council members, they reflect on their time spent as leaders in the Republican party to guide their work going forward.

Petsas served as chair of former Legislative District 28 in 2016 and 2021.

She said during her time in leadership, she saw a shift in the grassroots of the Republican party, which started with a hike in participation.

“The grassroots were those reliable, trusted messengers that you went to and you knew within your community that were reliable arbiters of information,” Petsas said. “I would say in the Republican Party, especially in the districts, we honestly had people who understand the Republican brand, they were reliable messengers of Republican policies.”

She continued, “That changed dramatically.”

Petsas pinpointed the 2020 election as a pressure point, which ushered in a new interest in party participation.

“When I was chairman in 2016, we’d get maybe one or two a month interested in becoming a precinct committeeman,” Petsas said. “But when 2020 happened and I became chairman, I must have been getting 20 to 50 requests a week. It was dramatic.”

Petsas said the sudden interest struck her as odd, so she started meeting with interested committeemen about their motivations. She often heard a vested interest in election fraud.

“It was a perfect storm,” Petsas said. “A lot of these districts were wide open spaces where precinct committeemen and people interested can be appointed. We were really susceptible when it came to the grassroots, you had so many people out of the woodwork that were believing that the election was stolen.”

She continued, “These were not the people we should be elevating to a grassroots position. They would be, what we would call, in any normal setting, in any normal year, a low information voter.”

Petsas is still involved as a committeeman and said the conversation around election security still persists, leaving a tangible goal for her work with RightCount.

“What’s important is that you have leaders,” Petsas said. “When you have those voices of confidence, who have, in some respects, for generations, been helping not just elect people, but get volunteers for candidates, and volunteer at the polls, that have strong voices that can advocate for the security of our elections.”

As a council member for RightCount, Petsas said she aims first to start the conversation.

“My main goal is to find avenues of communication with those wavering their election trust and to bring them in so that they feel confident and trust election professionals,” Petsas said. “To understand that the people who are running our elections are not the corner store barista.”

Eppihimer served as chair of the Pima County Republican party from 2016 to 2022.

Similar to Petsas, Eppihimer found former President Donald Trump brought a swell of new faces to the party, ultimately leading to a tip toward the MAGA wing.

“It activated a lot of people that had not been active before,” Eppihimer said.

In the realm of election trust, though, Eppihimer said he has seen trust grow since the 2020 election.

“I think that there is greater confidence now in the election process and the validity of vote totals than there was after the 2020 election,” Eppihimer said. “I think there was a lot of effort put into rebuilding confidence.”

He noted, in his experience, his time spent observing the ballot counting process after 2020 cemented his trust in the electoral process.

“I watched the votes being counted. I worked shifts at the recorder’s office and watched them validating signatures and calling people if signatures didn’t seem correct,” Eppihimer said. “I had a lot of confidence in 2020 because I saw it. I wasn’t just listening to a narrative that the election was stolen.”

As for his role on RightCount, Eppihimer championed the effort in the way it seeks to “make people more comfortable with the process, the counting process, the registration process, so that there’ll be more trust in the result, however it goes, than there was in Republican circles in 2020.”

Robert Graham served as Republican party chair from 2013 through 2017.

He noted Republicans can have an “innate distrust” of government anyway and for voting in particular, the apparent loss of control after casting a ballot can add to a feeling of unease.

In his experience, he found “trust comes with service.”

“You could be a registered Republican and never have an experience as a precinct committeeman,” Graham said. “You may cast the vote, but you don’t follow the process through. You’re not chasing ballots. You’re not doing what you got to do to try to assure that people get out and vote. And so with that lack of intimacy with the process, and I’m not using this in a pejorative way, people are ignorant. They don’t know. And sometimes ignorance causes fear.”

Ahead of Trump’s election in 2016, Graham said the party saw an influx of volunteers.

“We couldn’t deploy people fast enough, because so many people were interested in helping,” Graham said. “But when you have this big wave of people come… they’re hard to train, they’re hard to educate. We did the best we possibly could to keep them understanding the voting process and election process.”

***

Graham said his key goal going forward is to ensure people are involved, voting and swapping out election denial for election integrity.

“I think skepticism is healthy … just because it keeps you alert and paying attention,” Graham said. “You can watch. You can see how things are run. Look at your polling stations. Look at the process of your mail-in ballot. Did it make it? Did you get notification that it’s there?”

He said with RightCount, the goal is to shore up trust but also to ensure an accurate outcome by highlighting checks and balances and keeping people involved, engaged and participating.

“The idea is that you can be skeptical. I encourage people to go out and hit up organizations like ours, or read more, try to find their way to understanding,” Graham said. “Voting shouldn’t be an angry event. It shouldn’t be this political angst.”

To read the Arizona Capitol Times article in full, click here.

To learn more about RightCount’s operations in Arizona visit www.rightcount.org/arizona.