Republican Jack Sellers endorsed Democrat Joel Navarro to replace him on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
Sellers, who represents the East Valley’s District 1, was defeated by Chandler City Councilman Mark Stewart in the GOP primary in July.
Two of Sellers’ fellow Republican Supervisors, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, are not seeking re-election, meaning three of the top election officials in the state’s largest county who defended the county against false claims that its elections are affected by widespread voter fraud will not be on the board last year.
Who wins those seats in November will determine which party controls the Board of Supervisors, which runs elections in the country’s fourth largest county, over the next four years.
Sellers said he said he endorsed Navarro because he thinks the Democrat will pick up where Sellers, Gates and Hickman left off.
“The future of our democracy is on the ballot this November,” Sellers said in a statement. “As a member of the Board of Supervisors, I am proud of our work to oversee and support the administration of safe, secure and accurate elections. Moving forward, we need public officials who are willing to stand up against lies and misinformation in defense of Maricopa County voters. Joel Navarro is one of those leaders.”
Navarro confirmed he believes the county’s elections are fair.
“And I think they've been that way for a long time,” Navarro said. “And like everything else, you always want to make things better and better. As time goes by, you always find things that you want to make more efficient, more opportunity, all those good things and safe and secure.”
Navarro, a firefighter and former Tempe Councilman, called Sellers a “friend and mentor.”
“To Jack’s supporters, and anyone else troubled by the attacks on democratic norms by political extremists, there is a place for you in my campaign for a safer, healthier and prosperous Maricopa County,” he said.
Sellers blamed his July loss on “election deniers,” who have attempted to “undermine our Democracy.”
Earlier in his campaign, Stewart, an outgoing Chandler Councilman, criticized the county’s past election administration and declined to say whether he would have certified the 2020 election, according to SanTan Sun News.
He told KJZZ News he “absolutely” believes the county’s most recent primary election was fair.
“So the greatest thing that just happened was we went through a primary where we had none of the snafus of printer breakdowns, ballot size issues, all those things,” Stewart said. “Those are functional issues. As a first principles business owner, right, you look at the root cause of what's causing the issues, right? And it looks like the Board of Supervisors and the Recorder actually did that, and so we didn't have the issues that we've had in 2022 and 2020 in this particular election.”
District 1 was extremely competitive in 2020, when Sellers defeated Democrat Jevin Hodge by just a few hundred votes.
However, new district maps adopted by the Board of Supervisors that went into effect this year shifted the district towards Republicans, who now make up about 37% of voters. Independents make up about 34% of the electorate followed by Democrats at 28%
ABC 15’s Garrett Archer reported that Democratic President Joe Biden had a slight edge with the voters that make up the new district in 2020. In 2022, Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes increased that margin, though Republican Treasurer Kimberly Yee also handedly won the group.
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