Local Official Becomes Champion of Democracy: “I Did My Job”

Bill Gates at Batten Hour
Bill Gates at Batten Hour, October 28, 2024. All photos by Lizzy Goldstein/UVA Batten.

On Sept. 11, 2001, attorney Bill Gates was home with his infant daughter, watching on TV as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. He remembers  thinking to himself that maybe someday, he would have a platform to help people cope in the face of tragedy.

Fast-forward nearly two decades —  including a standout legal career and numerous leadership roles for the lifelong Republican — and Gates was presented with the opportunity to do precisely that. In 2020, he was a member of the Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County, Arizona, the fourth-highest populated county in the U.S., which became Ground Zero for voter-fraud conspiracies.

“Now I’m elected, now I’m in local government, and my moment comes,” Gates told a rapt audience at Monday’s Batten Hour in a conversation on election integrity with Bertrall Ross, director of the UVA’s Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. 

“And I do something so mundane. I did my job.”

Watch the video here

Usually, Gates said, the process of running elections is “something ministerial that nobody cares about.” But that year, the integrity of the presidential election process was scrutinized and criticized like never before. And Maricopa County, with razor-thin results in a swing state, was a top target.

Gates said that the county's primaries earlier that year had been uneventful. On the day of the presidential election, he acknowledged there were “administrative hiccups” — longer lines than usual, for example, which captured media attention — but overall, the experience of preparing and running a presidential election amid a pandemic in such a large community was a positive one.

“I was an election day lawyer for the Republican Party for many years and I’d never seen a smoother election — smooth as glass,” Gates recalled.

All that changed when Fox News called Joe Biden for Arizona later that night, and “the focus of the alt-right came to Maricopa County.” 

Bill Gates at Batten Hour

Local election workers were confronted with heavily armed individuals outside the ballot tabulation center; Alex Jones from InfoWars showed up, as did the man who later became known as the “QAnon Shaman,” pounding on a drum outside on the night the elections officials voted to certify the count. The voter fraud allegations and conspiracy theories gained traction at unprecedented speed, Gates said.

“My colleagues and I were convinced the election was safe and secure, and we voted to certify the election and we hoped that would be the end of it,” he explained. Instead, Maricopa County’s votes “may have been the most scrutinized in the history of the world.”

Arizona became the prime target of election deniers and the “Stop the Steal” movement. Local officials and their families were subjected to death threats and violence. At one point, Gates and his colleagues faced potential jail time for simply asking a higher court to review a subpoena to turn over ballots and tabulation machines.

Throughout those weeks and months, the pressure and the hostile environment took a toll on him, and with his wife’s encouragement, Gates sought professional counseling. “My therapist helped me understand. You know, trauma is trauma.” In 2023, a journalist friend urged him to tell his story publicly.

“Little known fact: in Republican school, they tell you not to talk to the media, and I had overcome that because of what happened,” Gates said. “I’m so happy that I did because of the people who have come to me and shared their stories with me because they read the article. That was like a gift that each one of them has given me.

“It helps me to continue to process this because this is a lot, we who are in elections, but really, all of us as a country, what we're going through.”  

Gates has also been a vigorous advocate for election integrity and a champion for local election workers and volunteers whom he says are on the frontlines of democracy. “This will be the third election cycle we’ve had this sort of scrutiny, this sort of pressure. The election workers inspire me. They are committed to the mission.”

He’s also cognizant of the example the U.S. sets — good and bad — when it comes to democratic elections. “When we engage in bad behavior, not only are our young people watching that, the rest of the world is watching that … and it threatens to erode other democracies,” he said.

Indeed, Maricopa County became domestically and internationally significant last election, and is still scrutinized this year. Just this week, Foreign Policy Magazine, Politico and the Washington Post have revisited election integrity in Arizona.

In reflecting on his experience, Gates said he's found the platform to make the change that he’d hoped for two decades ago. And all he had to do was do his job.

Per Maricopa County’s official webpage: Gates is the recipient of various awards, commending his years of leadership, service and defense of democracy including the Maricopa County Bar Association’s 2023 Public Lawyer of the Year, the Ed Pastor 2023 Public Servant Award, The Truman Foundation’s Joseph E. Stevens Public Service Award in 2022, The Arizona Republic’s 2021 Arizonan of the Year, and The Phoenix Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 in 2010.

Bertrall Ross and Bill Gates at Batten Hour
Bertrall Ross, a law professor at UVA and director of its Karsh Center for Law and Democracy, greets guest speaker Bill Gates at Batten Hour. 

 

Garrett Hall at Sunset

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