Liz Harris (Arizona politician)

Harris, a real estate agent,[1][2] is a longtime promoter of QAnon conspiracies.[2][3] When QAnon message board operator Ron Watkins moved to Arizona in 2021 from Japan to run for Congress in the 2022 midterm election, Watkins listed property owned by Harris as his residential address on his voter registration.[4]

In 2020, Harris unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Arizona legislature.[2]

In 2022, Harris campaigned for election to the state House from the Arizona's 13th Legislative District,[5] a district covering portions of the Phoenix suburbs,[6] specifically south Chandler, west Gilbert, and Sun Lakes[7] in the East Valley.[8]

In the November 2022 election, Harris (along with Democratic Representative Jennifer Pawlik) was elected to the state House from the two-seat 13th District.[9] Harris defeated fellow Republican Julie Willoughby by 275 votes (after an automatic recount, in which Harris had a net gain of five votes, concluded in December 2022).[6][10]

Harris espouses election denialism.[2][5] After Donald Trump lost Arizona in the 2020 presidential election, Harris promoted unsupported claims that the election was "stolen" from Trump. She led a door-to-door canvassing campaign in an bid to find supposed "election fraud" and released a report (possibly debunked by election experts) claiming fraud.[5][11] (The Arizona Attorney General's office, then led by Republican attorney general Mark Brnovich, assigned 60 staffers to investigate the 2020 election; after spending 10,000 hours investigating, no evidence of fraud was found.)[3] Harris's door-to-door canvassing effort drew scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department Civil Rights Division on concerns of potential voter intimidation.[11] Harris claimed in a May 2021 video that her efforts were part of a "good versus evil" and that efforts in Arizona would lead to revelations of nationwide election fraud.[12]

In September 2022, Harris spoke at a national conspiracist conference hosted by Mike Lindell, a businessman who had urged Trump to declare martial law to remain in power; Lindell asserted that the summit would be "one of the most important events in history."[5] At the event, Harris promoted claims of election fraud, and claimed that her allies were being persecuted.[5]

After her election, Harris baselessly claimed that the 2022 Arizona elections, in which Republicans lost top statewide races, was marred by fraud. She threatened to refuse to cast any vote in the House until the election was redone.[8][13][5]

Upon taking office in January 2023, she introduced legislation that would ban both mail-in voting and in-person early voting, and make it easier to challenge election results in court.[14]

Although a first-term representative, Harris's vote was important to the Republicans' one-vote majority in the House.[15] (Republicans hold 31 seats, and Democrats 29 seats.)[14] In February 2023, Harris was the sole Republican to vote against a major Republican budget package, defeating the measure.[16]