Maricopa County recorder eliminates 6 positions focused on countering election disinformation

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap said he cut funding for and eliminated six positions in the office’s external communications team, reducing the size to one person.

Heap, a Republican who took office in January, said in an update on Friday that the previous recorder had placed too much focus on external political communications.

“In response, I have eliminated the salaries and positions of six external communications officers to free up resources for needed improvements to the development and management of our key databases and electronic systems,” said Heap, whose office splits election duties with the county’s Board of Supervisors.

The office will keep one external communications staffer and its six-member “voter info” communications team, which disseminates official information about elections and other recording matters, according to Heap's chief of staff, Samuel Stone.

A spokesperson for the Recorder's Office confirmed the communications employees in question resigned before Heap took office, and Heap decided not to fill those vacant positions to allocate that funding elsewhere.

Heap's announcement signals a shift away from the philosophy of his predecessor Stephen Richer, a Republican whose office had spent four years aggressively defending how elections were run and votes were counted in Maricopa County. The battleground county has been a near-constant target of voting-related disinformation, conspiracy theories and threats since 2020, when President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election led to a surge in voters doubting the legitimate results.

Richer told The Associated Press last year that while he didn’t have any staffers dedicated full time to monitoring mis- and disinformation or online threats, his communications team had taken on some of that work. He said they collaborated with the board of supervisors office, the sheriff’s office and local police.

Richer also regularly stepped in personally to correct false posts that were going viral, using his account on the social platform X to reply directly to users and explain the facts about how voting and vote-counting worked.

Heap “does not believe it is appropriate for government agencies to police online ‘misinformation,’” Stone said in an email to the AP. He said future threats toward election officials would be handled by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

Heap, who unseated Richer in a Republican primary last year and beat another Democratic candidate in November, has stopped short of saying the 2020 and 2022 elections were stolen. He has said that voters don’t trust the state’s voting system because it is poorly run.

“It’s not because they believe misinformation on social media,” Heap said during a debate in June. “It’s because they see the same problems happening election cycle after election cycle after election cycle, and they cannot get elected officials to even acknowledge that this is a massive problem and address their concerns.”

Heap has unveiled plans he says will improve voter confidence in elections, including culling inactive voters from the rolls and allowing election observers to watch the process of verifying signatures on early ballots up close.

His pivot away from correcting election disinformation aligns with the Trump administration, which has been vocal in arguing it isn't the government's place. Trump has railed against what he calls government “censorship” of U.S. citizens and last month ordered that federal employees do nothing to abridge legal American speech.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect that Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap cut funding and eliminated six external communications positions.