OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
An Arizona Republican Maricopa County Supervisor was caught on audio criticizing his fellow Republicans for the review of the 2020 election and now he has resigned.
Steve Chucri’s resignation will become effective on November 5 and the remaining members of the Board of Supervisors will select his replacement, The Arizona Mirror reported.
In the conversation with conservative activists, which they recorded in January and March and provided to right-wing media this week, Chucri also made an outlandish claim that dead people voted in the November election, and alleged problems with illegal ballot harvesting and a law that Gov. Doug Ducey signed last year that allowed election workers to analyze digital images of ballots in cases where it was unclear which candidate a voter chose.
Chucri lamented in a recording of a March 22 conversation that fellow Republicans Bill Gates and Jack Sellers, the board’s vice chairman and chairman, respectively, didn’t support the upcoming Senate review of Maricopa County’s election results. He said he’d personally told Senate President Karen Fann, who ordered the self-styled audit, that they would agree with him in supporting the election review.
Maricopa County was the driving force behind that law, and it was supported by Chucri and the other county supervisors.
“You know what I think it was, in hindsight? Gates got scared because he barely won, and Jack got scared because he only won by 200 votes. And if there was an audit and a recount — which is pretty bullshit, by the way — what would happen in those two races? And that is way too self-serving,” he said in the secret recordings.
The comments were made, and secretly recorded, at a March meeting with Shelby Busch and Steve Robinson of the conservative group We the People AZ Alliance which, when the meeting took place, wanted recall elections of everyone on the Board of Supervisors.
In announcing his resignation he apologized to his fellow board members and said that it was an honor serving with them.
“The comments I made were during a very turbulent time. My colleagues have every right to be both angry and disappointed with me. I should not have made such statements and offer my colleagues heartfelt apologies,” Churci said.
“I do not want to perpetuate the very problem I ran to eliminate several years ago. While I have had my differences with my colleagues, I have known them to be good, honorable and ethical men,” he said.
Churci had also made a claim that is unsupported saying that he believed dead people had voted in the 2020 election. There is no evidence to support that claim.
“I think it was done through dead people voting. I think it was multifaceted. I think there’s a lot of cleanup here,” he said to Busch in a phone call on January 22.
But he has since said that the political landscape “has changed for the worst this year,” which he now attributes to false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
“The environment is wrought with toxicity — and all civility and decorum no longer seem to have a place. The fixation with the 2020 election results and aftermath have gotten out of control,” he said.
Churci also went after the Gateway Pundit website and others for using his comments at some type of evidence that there were issues with the voting in Maricop County.
“The picture some individuals are trying to paint about a cover-up, scam and other nonsense about my colleagues and myself is simply false. There was no cover-up, the election was not stolen. Biden won,” he said.
Those comments go against what he said in his secret recordings but in May he joined his Board of Supervisors colleagues in criticizing the audit.
“There was doubt cast, so I supported the audit. What I didn’t support was a mockery, and that’s what this has become,” he said.
