PHOENIX — “We've never had a perfect election," former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell said. "Anybody ever says they did, they didn't have one."
Purcell held the county's top elections for 7 terms and 28 years. From paper punch cards all the way to electronic voting machines.
And after 28 years, she remembers the first time she heard a candidate publicly say she shouldn't be trusted.
“I couldn't believe that people were even saying what they did," Purcell said.
Sure, candidates would sometimes come in, not believing that their support could have dried up, or believing there must have been a miscount. But after seeing the process, Purcell said, they always left understanding why they lost.
However, around 2016, which was also her last year in office, the false claims about election integrity started taking hold.
Since then, she's seen her successors deal with publicized conspiracy theories, protests, rallies on election night, death threats and more.
That’s why she wrote an op-ed in The Arizona Republic, trying to head off the claims she knows are coming for Tuesday's primary election.
"Here's what really happens," Purcell said. "And if you don't believe that, then go get involved in it.”
Purcell wrote that Maricopa County's elections system was built to be transparent. The tabulating center has glass windows so that people can watch the process. there are cameras that are live-streamed around the clock. People can volunteer to watch or even to work the election and learn the process for themselves.
That's not to say there aren't issues. There are, but Purcell said they're typically mistakes and hassles...not grand schemes to swing an election.
“There's always something in every election," Purcell said. Sometimes a custodian doesn't show up to unlock the door to a polling place, or computers that check people in won't start, or an underestimate of the amount of people that will vote.
Issues like that cost Purcell her re-election bid in 2016 when the number of polling places was cut from 200 to 60. There were huge lines at polling places for the presidential preference election. Some people waited five hours or more to vote.
But in the end, everyone voted and the votes were counted, as they are every year.
Now, at age 88, Helen Purcell could be sitting back and watching others deal with the false claims and conspiracies. But she can't. She said elections were 28 years of her life, she can't stay silent while they're attacked.
“I want people to respect our system," she said. "We worked very hard for a lot of years to put the system in place, and I want people to respect it and feel comfortable in going to vote. This is about, you know, our country, the future of our country.”
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