Maricopa County (Ariz.) Supervisor announces he won’t seek reelection

Maricopa County (Ariz.) Supervisor Clint Hickman, who reportedly faced pressure from his party to potentially alter the results of the 2020 election, announced Thursday that he will not seek reelection.

“I will not seek another term as the county supervisor representing District 4,” Hickman, a Republican representing cities including Goodyear and Avondale, said in a statement.  

“I am choosing to give my undivided attention to my wife, children, family business, and friends. I couldn’t be more excited,” Hickman continued. “To my constituents, thank you for trusting me to serve our West Valley. Never forget the power you have as voters to choose your representatives.”

Hickman was previously in the headlines in 2021, following reports that the then-chair of the Arizona GOP, Kelli Ward, contacted him about the accuracy of the 2020 election results.

Ward reportedly sent a text to Hickman a few days after the election in which she asked him to “at least get an independent computer expert” to check if his county had problems with the ballot count, according to a report from the Arizona Republic.

Hickman was the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors at the time, giving him the power to certify or delay the 2020 election results.

“Not someone who already works there,” she reportedly wrote. “These ballots can be counted manually, assuming nobody deleted the folder holding the ambiguous ballot scans. If the folder was deleted, federal data forensics teams could theoretically undelete it and perhaps track down the person who deleted it. What if election fraud was as easy as dragging votes from one folder to another?”

Ward reportedly called the claims “BS.”

The White House switchboard also called Hickman twice in January 2021, and an operator asked him to call the president back.

Hickman told the Arizona Republic he thought former President Trump was going to request he change the 2020 election results or push election conspiracy theories.

“I didn’t want to walk into that space,” Hickman told the outlet.

Fellow Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates praised Hickman in a statement, saying it “has been one of the greatest honors and privileges of my career to serve with” Hickman for more than seven years.

“As Chairman in 2020, Clint Hickman faced intense pressure from leaders of our party to disregard his oath and to refuse to certify the results in the Presidential election,” Gates said in a post on social media. “Chairman Hickman’s courage in standing up to this pressure and his commitment to doing the right thing have inspired my colleagues and I to do the same.”