Maricopa County recorder now says staff error partly to blame for 83,000 erroneous voter letters

After days of claiming his office was blameless for an error that erroneously mailed letters to 83,000 voters, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap acknowledged one of his employees approved the inaccurate mailers.

Heap has faced withering criticism for his response to the mistake, which last week he blamed solely on a third-party vendor. 

About 3% of the county’s voting population should have received a letter asking them to provide proof of citizenship – an effort to fix a glitch in the voter registration system caused by the Motor Vehicle Division.

Instead, they were told to respond to the recorder’s office, or else they’d be categorized as inactive voters.

“This error was not caused by internal mistakes at the MCRO. The vendor has taken full responsibility for the mistake, and has already begun mailing out the corrected correspondence to the affected voters at their own expense, so there will be no additional cost to the taxpayers,” Heap said in a statement Friday.

But emails between the recorder’s office and the vendor, first obtained by 12News, show a failsafe is in place to prevent exactly the type of error that occurred.

The vendor shared a PDF proof of the mailers with the recorder’s office prior to mailing them, and an employee approved the inaccurate proofs – “these are good to go,” staff wrote in an email.

Heap issued a new statement late Monday evening acknowledging “new information” he claims was uncovered during an internal investigation into the error – a mistake Heap characterized as a “breakdown in communication.”

“The error appears to have been twofold,” Heap said Monday. “The first error occurred when the vendor inadvertently switched the content of the proofs. The second error occurred when an employee of the MCRO mistakenly approved that incorrect proof.”

Heap’s second statement made no mention of whether Maricopa County taxpayers would bear some of the cost for the mistaken mailer, given his staff’s mistake. The recorder’s office did not immediately respond to KJZZ for comment.

Heap’s fellow Republicans on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors were furious with the recorder’s initial response to the error, which came days after the mistake was first reported. Supervisors Thomas Galvin and Debbie Lesko said they received calls from panicked constituents who were unable to get answers from the recorder’s office.