Parker Wallis
County recorder Leslie Hoffman and elections director Lynn Constabile of Yavapai County announce their official resignations after more than a year and a half of threats and heated words from Trump supporters.
As one of Arizona’s 15 county recorders, Hoffman’s responsibilities include keeping public records, registering voters, and ensuring mail ballots make it to the voters who cast their ballots through the mail, which includes 80 percent of the state’s voter base.
Hoffman, who was elected as county recorder in 2012, announced her resignation on July 1st, having already accepted a job outside the county. Her last day is set for July 22nd.
“A lot of it is the nastiness that we have dealt with,” she said. “I’m a Republican recorder living in a Republican county where the candidate that they wanted to win won by 2-to-1 in this county and still getting grief, and so is my staff.”
The “nastiness” comes from ardent Trump supporters who believe in the former President’s conspiracy theories regarding election fraud in the 2020 election, and they have followed Hoffman into meetings with the Board of Supervisors, carrying signs and hissing during proceedings.
“Every time we have something on the agenda,” Hoffman said, “people come in and protest it.”
The constant “accusations and threats,” as described by Hoffman, were enough for the local sheriff’s department to assign security detail to Hoffman. Law enforcement regularly patrolled her home, a measure unheard of until now.
“The threats I have, the sheriff patrols my house periodically. It’s getting to be a lot and when the job offer came, I took it,” said Hoffman, as reported by ABC 15 Arizona.
Constabile, who served as election director for 18 years overseeing ballot counting, announced her resignation for similar reasons. Constabile’s last day was on July 8th, and she was unavailable for comment due to preparations for the state’s primary.
Both resignations come weeks before the primaries, but Hoffman told The Post she was confident about the primaries running smoothly, that remaining staff are “going to be very diligent on researching anybody that they would consider to appoint.”
Earlier this year, Ken Matta, resigned after 20 years of working at the secretary of state’s office, and the straw that broke the camel’s back may have been the Republican-ordered Arizona election audit and the stress surrounding it.
“At the sham Maricopa County partisan election review … almost every day as the most hated person in the room,” he wrote in a May 2nd Twitter thread.
Matta also recounts “carrying a gun when I had to start driving through a gauntlet of assault rifles carried by misinformed protesters to get into the Coliseum every day,” and his office “started receiving horrible threats.” Matta adds that he couldn’t wait “for the day I don’t feel I need that anymore.”
Arizona officials are not the only ones feeling the pressure from Trump-supporting election deniers.
Just last month, former Georgia election worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss testified at the January 6 committee’s public hearing about the violent and racist threats from a group of Trump supporters, which forced her to leave her job, hide her identity, and live in Airbnbs for two months, per the FBI’s recommendation.
“I felt horrible,” she told the panel. “I felt homeless. I can’t believe [Trump] has caused this much damage to me and my family to have to leave my home.”
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