Trump Allies Gain Power Over Elections in Arizona’s Largest County | Bolts

Justin Heap, a lawmaker aligned with election deniers, and like-minded Republicans won key Maricopa County offices. Voting advocates hope that guardrails will protect local elections.

Alex Burness | November 12, 2024

Justin Heap, an Arizona lawmaker who has pushed for severe voting restrictions and whose campaign was led by an indicted 2020 “fake elector” for Donald Trump, has won control of one of the country’s most important local elections offices.

Voters in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and most of Arizona’s population, elected Heap last week to be their next county recorder. He defeated Democrat Tim Stringham by about four percentage points—a relative blowout for the nation’s most populous swing county, where the last two recorder elections were decided by 0.3 points and 1.1 points, respectively.

Maricopa County has been a hotbed of conspiracy theories about voter fraud since the 2020 election, and the outgoing recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, suffered death threats for rebuffing these unfounded allegations. Heap, who defeated Richer in the GOP primary in July, has fanned those conspiracy theories and refused to recognize as legitimate the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections.

As a state representative, Heap backed legislation to ban most early-voting options in the state and to encourage hand-counting of ballots. He ran this year with the backing of a corps of prominent far-right politicians like Kari Lake, who have spent recent years sowing distrust in the state’s election results. Echoing their lie that election administration in Arizona is conducive to fraud, he vowed to pursue major changes from the recorder’s office.

“The voters are sick of our elections making us a national laughingstock,” he told the crowd at an Arizona rally for Trump in September. “The voters are sick of being mocked and condescended to when they ask sincere questions about our election system. And, most of all, voters are sick of hearing from their neighbors, ‘Why should I even vote if I can’t trust the system?’”

Heap now assumes office at the same time Trump retakes the White House, having signaled his intent to use federal law to restrict voter registration and ballot access. Heap’s promises to “clean the voter rolls” or to have all votes be counted by Election Day could test how far Trump allies can stretch this playbook in local election offices.

But Heap will face many constraints in implementing his agenda. The recorder’s office can’t just wipe people off of voter rolls, as state law explicitly forbids that. It can’t ensure election results are known by the end of Election Day, mainly because the office doesn’t even control ballot tabulation in the county. And if Heap doubts the results of any future election, he cannot thwart certification because that, too, is outside of his office’s purview. The secretary of state’s office, in Democratic hands until at least 2026, looms as another check since it issues regulations guiding how elections must be run.

Plus, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees many election administration duties, moved just last month to take away some more power from the office Heap will inherit.

The degree of pushback this board would give him remains to be seen. Two like-minded Republicans won supervisor elections on Tuesday, bringing the body closer to his politics.

One is Debbie Lesko, a U.S. representative who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021; she will replace a Republican who faced threats for defending the local system. The other, Mark Stewart, has also questioned past election results. He successfully challenged Republican incumbent Jack Sellers, who got flack from conservatives for certifying election results.

After losing to Stewart in the July primary, Sellers endorsed the Democratic nominee over Stewart, because, he told Phoenix radio station KJZZ, “the future of democracy is on the ballot.” But Stewart prevailed by about four percentage points last week.

Still, election experts in Arizona told Bolts that, even as they’ll vigilantly monitor the effects of Heap’s policies on voting rights and access, they’re cautiously hopeful that sufficient backstops exist to hold him in check if he attempts drastic measures.

“I’m a little bit worried, but I try to be optimistic that things will be OK,” said Helen Purcell, who served as the recorder in Maricopa County from 1989 to 2017. “Mr. Heap has limited abilities in what he can and cannot do as far as influencing the process. So I’ll try to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he will abide by our state laws and federal laws.”

Purcell, a Republican, is one in a string of elections officials in Maricopa County who have fought back against election deniers since 2020. Her successor in office, Democrat Adrian Fontes, is now Arizona’s secretary of state and has placed himself on the frontlines of that fight. The recorder after Fontes was Richer, who became a national figure for frequently refuting his own party’s false claims of voter fraud.

Richer this fall teamed up with the county’s GOP-run board of supervisors to restrict the powers of the recorder’s office going forward. Under the terms of an agreement they reached on Oct. 23, the supervisors will now manage the processing of early ballots, a job the county recorder previously had. The supervisors will also take control of the recorder’s IT staff and its $5 million budget.

This shift in responsibility continued a trend that has reduced the recorder’s role in elections over the last decade. When Purcell was in office, the recorder had purview over most everything to do with elections. But Republican supervisors snatched some power once Fontes, the Democrat, came into office. From that point, the recorder was left in charge of voter registration and early voting, while the supervisors handled Election Day voting, the creation of the ballots, and the tabulation of the ballots. The board will retain these roles going forward.

As county recorder, Heap will control voter registration and the handling of early ballot requests. He’ll also control signature verification on early ballots and the process of curing early ballots that are tentatively rejected because of an error such as a mismatched or missing voter signature.

Purcell worries that Heap could use his authority to target certain voters. “My concern is with voter registration and how he’ll instruct staff to deal with that,” she told Bolts.

She stressed that outside organizations facilitate a lot of voter registrations. “I wonder whether he’ll take a cautious view about those groups, which could have the possibility of curtailing certain people being able to vote,” she said.

Arizona already has strict laws when it comes to how people register to vote, as it requires proof of citizenship, unlike most states. Alex Gulotta, state director of the Arizona arm of All Voting is Local, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights, worries about residents who’ll encounter issues like an error on their registration forms, or a mismatched signature on their mail ballot.

He warns that these voters will be adversely affected if Heap does not make a point to provide easy access to outside groups and to actively reach out to voters affected by an error.

“I have no doubt that if someone wanted to create an office that was harsher and less caring of voters, they could do that,” Gulotta told Bolts. “People rely on the recorder’s office every day to fix little things that are broken. If it’s not accessible and they don’t fix things adequately, such that there are hours-long wait times, it can really have a negative impact.”

Throughout his campaign, Heap has failed to produce concrete evidence that Maricopa County elections are mismanaged. There has been no finding of fraud or other systemic voting issues in Maricopa County; a post-2020 audit of the county elections turned up nothing. When the local PBS station pressed Heap for evidence to back up his claims, Heap provided none and rather pointed simply to the fact that he’s heard from constituents who perceive problems.

Heap did not reply to a request for comment for this article.

A majority of Maricopa County supervisors seem unlikely to be receptive to major election overhauls. Republicans have controlled this board without interruption since the 1960s, and on Tuesday they kept that streak going; as of publication, the GOP has won three of the five seats on the board and Democrats have won one. The fifth seat is too close to call.

But while incoming supervisors Stewart and Lesko are election deniers, the third Republican supervisor, Thomas Galvin, has defended the county’s election system, and he beat an election denier in the July primary. Kate Brophy McGee, the Republican leading in the unresolved race—by just 359 votes as of Tuesday morning—also has a reputation for being relatively moderate.

Stringham, Heap’s defeated Democratic opponent, hopes that these officials can provide a backstop that would prevent Heap from upending elections, but he cautioned that it would be difficult for Republican officials to withstand pressure from the rest of their party.

“Thomas Galvin is absolutely not an election denier, and I don’t think that Kate Brophy McGee is either,” Stringham told Bolts. “But the problem with Republican politics is that if you don’t go along with it, you’re out, so I don’t think you can look at that board and go, ‘It’s OK; there’s three non-election deniers.” He added, “I think there are four Republicans and one Democrat, and the Republican Party math is that you’ll go along with it.”

Still, Stringham predicted that even Heap may suffer blowback from his party’s base, as Richer did, if the GOP ends up losing Arizona’s elections in 2026 or 2028 and again falsely alleges fraud.

“He can’t really deliver on this crap, but he can get blamed for it,” Stringham said.

Purcell and Gulotta also worry that local guardrails may not be sufficient to keep up morale among election workers. Arizona has already seen very high turnover in election administration since 2020.

“In any institution, the attitude of the leader impacts the way people behave and whether or not people want to work in the office,” Gulotta said.

Heap will not be the only election denier to assume leadership over an elections office in Arizona. Republican Recorder David Stevens cruised to re-election in Cochise County, which has made national news for illegally seeking hand-counts of election results. Stevens partnered with his county’s supervisors in that effort.

In Yuma County, Republican David Lara, who is an outspoken election denier, unseated a non-election denier Republican in the primary and then won overwhelmingly last week. Lara has often lied about Arizona elections and has floated punishing voter fraud with the death penalty. His purported investigation into election tampering claims helped inspire “2,000 Mules,” the debunked movie that alleges the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Yuma County, unlike Maricopa County, places virtually all election-related duties in the office of the recorder, meaning that Lara’s control over how his office runs elections is likely to have far fewer checks than Heap’s will.

Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Arizona State University, is familiar with voter suppression in Arizona, as an advocate for the voting rights of Native people. Her legal clinic sued Apache County last week for turning away or otherwise discouraging participation by Native voters—the latest reminder, she said, of why it matters to have local elections offices that prioritize voter access. Following last week’s results, she told Bolts she looks warily toward future cycles: “People need to perform their ministerial functions they’ve been put in place to do. There should be guardrails in place to protect that, but if you start doing things that are disenfranchising your own voters, people are going to be pretty upset.”

Ferguson-Bohnee also noted that the conservative claims that Arizona elections are rigged suddenly quieted once Trump carried the state last week.

“They’re not claiming any voter fraud because of the way the election turned out,” she said.

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