‘Where’s Celia?’ A conspiracy-addled mob hounds a former Arizona elections official
This article was published in partnership with Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the US.
They started searching for her in late January.
“Where’s CELIA NABOR?” one member of the angry online mob wrote. “Find her,” another wrote. Track her phone, credit cards, social security number and social media, others suggested. It was time for her to “face the music”. “COULD SHE BE AT HOME ???? ” someone wrote, posting her address.
And then, that same night, after 2am, someone started banging on Celia Nabor’s door.
She lay frozen in bed in her suburban Phoenix neighborhood, terrified, wondering if one of her online harassers had come to follow through on the threats. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the pounding stopped.
Nabor never found out who knocked on her door that night. What she did know was that the trouble had started earlier that week. On 30 January, GOP activists began spreading false information about her, based partly on documents acquired through records requests searching for fraud in Maricopa county’s elections, where Nabor helped oversee early voting.
They said Nabor was dodging a request to answer questions, prompting others to claim she had helped the county steal the election for Democrats. But that wasn’t true.
We the People AZ Alliance – a Phoenix-based political action committee funded primarily by Patrick Byrne and his organization the America Project – employed what’s become a familiar playbook among allies of former president Donald Trump: barrage local election offices with public records requests, then twist real records to make routine actions seem suspicious.
The organization dug into Nabor’s work, asking for copies of all of her texts and her emails. They asked for information on how she and the employees under her performed their jobs and whether they were disciplined. They wanted protocols and contractor names and contracts and more.
Extensive requests such as these are a complex piece of the ballooning number of public records requests to election offices across the country, according to Votebeat’s review of hundreds of public records requests and logs.
Records requests are a powerful tool for greater government transparency, but Votebeat found they are also being used to bolster lies about elections and push for more restrictive voting laws, challenge the outcome of elections in court, and, in the most extreme cases, fuel threats that upend people’s lives.
Local election officials across the country have told Votebeat they are running out of resources as they try not only to process the onslaught of public records requests but also combat the misinformation that follows. They used to get a few requests a year. Now they get hundreds.
Maricopa county, Arizona, went from receiving 100 election-related records requests in 2019 to nearly 12 times that in 2022. In Fulton county, Georgia – already the recipient of nearly 200 requests in 2020 – the number increased to 326 by 2022. Requests quadrupled to more than 1,200 in Harris county, and ballooned sevenfold in Wake county, North Carolina.
“It has consumed us,” said Olivia McCall, elections director in Wake county, which had to increase the county’s budget to hire someone just to process the incoming requests.
Samantha Shepherd, who processes the requests for Loudoun county, Virginia, was so slammed last year she couldn’t do her usual voter outreach activities, such as visiting schools and nursing homes.
Votebeat called Shelby Busch, We the People’s co-founder, and the organization’s lawyer, Bryan Blehm, to request an interview. Busch did not respond to a voicemail. Blehm hung up on a reporter after he was told about the story.
Votebeat then sent an email to Busch and Blehm requesting responses to specific questions and detailed findings for this article, and Blehm declined to respond unless he could meet in person for “a brief chat”, which wasn’t possible. Votebeat again offered to talk by phone or video, but Blehm declined. •••
Nabor filled a critical position for Maricopa county’s elections. Most people in the county – as well as statewide – vote by mail, and Nabor oversaw the process for verifying that mail-in ballots were cast by the correct registered voter, including the review of voters’ signatures on the ballot envelopes.
We the People has repeatedly claimed, without definitive proof, that this process is riddled with fraud.
The political action committee, led by Shelby Busch and Steve Robinson, has been pushing the unproven election fraud claims since shortly after the 2020 election, and has been claiming to have found widespread fraud within 2020’s voter signature review process since shortly before the 2022 election.
The organization is also one of the most prolific filers of election-related public records requests in the county. The group filed about 30 requests in the six months after the 2022 election alone and has filed more than a dozen specifically for signature verification-related records, according to county records.
The organization has made a few different claims about Nabor, including that she dodged their request to depose her about workers who had been disciplined – which is false – and that she put pressure on workers to approve fraudulent signatures, a claim Nabor’s attorney denies.
Votebeat has reconstructed what happened to Nabor as a result of We the People’s claims via internal county communications received through a public records request, text messages she sent at the time that were later shared by her attorney, interviews with two people familiar with the chain of events and statements made on her behalf by her attorney.
It started before the midterm election, when We the People claimed that “sources close to the 2022 primary election” said Nabor had told them that employees working on the 2020 election had been disciplined for failing to verify signatures,according to a court record. In September 2022, Busch filed a public records request to the county recorder’s office asking for the names of all employees who had verified the signatures for the last two and a half years, including all communication surrounding their hiring and any discipline.
On 3 November, We the People took the county to court seeking the records.
Then, Republican Kari Lake lost her bid for governor. She used We the People’s claims about fraudulent voter signatures in 2020 to claim that fraudulent signatures were what, in part, led to her loss against Democrat Katie Hobbs in 2022, and We the People started filing records requests to try to prove it.
Front and center in its quest was Nabor. We the People wanted to talk to her.
But she was already gone.
•••
Many election officials across the country have told Votebeat they have some version of We the People: local advocacy groups that file records requests, sometimes spreading bad information as they go. Elections offices are also now routinely hit with waves of records requests when calls to file them are issued by Trump allies.
In the summer of 2022, for example, election officials across the country were asked for a complicated dataset called a cast vote record, which tallies every vote cast on every ballot, after Mike Lindell encouraged his fans to request them.
In Maricopa county, along with the significant increase in numbers of requests, the recorder’s office is also seeing more requests for what it considers “extensive information” – requests that typically take more than 30 days to process, such as requests for internal conversations and requests requiring redactions. This has forced staff to work overtime, and pushed the county to start developing an automated system to process requests faster.
The Maricopa county recorder, Stephen Richer, said, “One man’s weaponization is the other man’s legitimate request, but certainly from my standpoint, many of these are not with a productive end in mind.” He said that’s especially true for the requests targeting specific employees.
Maricopa county eventually responded to We the People’s request for employee records, but redacted the names of the employees. While the county used to release the names of temporary election workers, this policy changed for the 2022 election. Richer said that was a conscious choice to protect the safety of the employees.
Richer said that while turnover wasn’t too bad in 2021 or 2022, since the November election many good employees – including Nabor – have left. The misinformation and threats, he said, are contributing to the exodus.
Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican lawyer who helps connect election officials with legal representation for harassment cases, said he isn’t sure what the goal is.
“There is no positive end game result for them in the hassling of election officials,” he said. “They will pay a price if their candidates ever win in a system they have tried to make as uncredible as possible.”
Rey Valenzuela, Maricopa county’s director of early voting and Nabor’s former supervisor, said in an interview that in his 33 years of election work, he’s never seen this kind of vitriol. He worries about the toll it is taking on his staff, and watches as some leave for other occupations and others stay but worry about their safety. They ask him questions, he said, like whether there are going to be armed guards and metal detectors for the next election.
“We know that they are concerned,” he said.
•••
During the midterm election, while a family member was ill, Nabor was working long hours, sometimes as many as 16 on some days. She had decided she wanted a different job – one that would allow her to spend less time at work and more time with family, her lawyer Tom Ryan said.
So, in mid-November 2022, she told Valenzuela she was planning to resign, Ryan said.
The county tried to keep her. Valenzuela said that Nabor had improved the county’s processes significantly, and her performance reviews, obtained by Votebeat, show she consistently surpassed expectations (“As has become the norm for Celia,” Valenzuela wrote in June 2022, “she has EXCELLED.”)
Still, Valenzuela said, he understood why she wanted to go.
On 25 November, the day after