The Maricopa County recorder is battling the Board of Supervisors in court for more control of elections, even accusing the board of causing voter disenfranchisement in a hearing on Monday.
The lawsuit is part of a battle led by Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, who argues the board unlawfully stripped him of staff, duties and the equipment he needs to do his job.
The board did shift some responsibilities away from the recorder at the end of 2024, but supervisors argue he’s misrepresenting just how much he’s legally owed.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney strongly suggested the parties just figure this one out on their own.
“These political decisions, involved in the political arena, not in the courts. So to the extent that you guys can come up with, you guys can get together and negotiate and come up with something to resolve this whole issue — please do it,” Blaney said.
Both sides said they’re open to having good faith negotiations outside of the court process, but each indicated that their opponents are preventing productive talks.
“The recorder’s position has always been that he would like to cooperate with the board,” said Heap’s attorney, James Rogers.
Rogers asked Blaney to issue an order declaring that the recorder’s necessary expenses aren’t being properly funded and the board is required to fund them.
“There’s a really big difference between what you want to have and what you need to have,” Attorney Kory Langhofer said on behalf of the board.
“Between these two offices, the Recorder’s Office and the Board of Supervisors office, and the only one of them has a history of threatening to cut the other one off and make sure they can’t do their jobs,” Langhofer said.
Heap’s chief of staff, Sam Stone, and Senior Director of Voter Registration Janine Petty testified that a small group of voters was disenfranchised in 2024 because of an altered election timeline and the office not getting the resources it needed.
If voters provide proof of their U.S. citizenship and Arizona residency, they’re able to vote “full ballots” — including state and local races. But, if they don’t provide that information, they’re only allowed to vote in federal races and are known as “federal only” voters.
A recent state law allows voters to become eligible to vote a full ballot by providing identification up until 7 p.m. on election night. That changed the election timeline, and because there was less time, Petty said some voters who provided information to vote full ballots only had their federal-race votes counted.
“Because the time frame was so condensed and the pressure to get provisionals done in advance of our deadlines, I was told that we could not go back and rescan all of those ballots,” Petty said in court. “It's basically looking for a needle in a haystack. So, there are many ballots that should have been upgraded to full ballot because we dispositioned them in this way, but they did not get rescanned.”
One of Heap’s main complaints is that the county board hasn’t allowed his office to procure an Agilis machine, which is used to sort mail-in ballots.
The main reasons why that request hasn’t been approved is because of the cost of the machine, which is at least $30,000, and the issue of finding somewhere to put it.
The opposing sides went back and forth about what’s considered the duty of the recorder, as opposed to the board or the elections director.
State law refers to the “officer in charge of elections,” which Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett and Langhofer said could refer to either the recorder or the election director, depending on the context. Therefore, they said anything in the law assigned to the “officer in charge of elections” is not necessarily under Heap’s purview.
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