Former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell backs supervisors in election fight with Heap

The longest serving recorder in Maricopa County history is siding with the Board of Supervisors in its fight with current Recorder Justin Heap over control of the county’s elections.

Republican Helen Purcell, who held the office for seven terms, filed a brief with the Arizona Court of Appeals, asking it to pause a lower court ruling that handed Heap a legal victory in the ongoing dispute.

In that ruling, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney found the board illegally took away the recorder’s information technology staff and tools when it consolidated those systems under the supervisors’ authority in a last-minute deal with lame duck Recorder Stephen Richer, months before Heap took office.

The judge ordered the board to restore Heap’s staff and IT tools or give him adequate funding to set up new IT systems.

Beyond that, Blaney attempted to interpret Arizona’s complicated web of election laws, which divides responsibilities between the board and recorder, to provide clarity on which office controls which functions.

But Purcell argues the order, which was handed down months before the July 21 primary, actually created more problems.

For one, it would require the Maricopa County Elections Department, which is supervised by the board, to split an interconnected IT system that handles functions controlled by both the board and recorder.

“In Maricopa County, for example, the Recorder’s signature verification operations depend on the same voter registration database that the Elections Department uses to sync e-pollbooks, draw precinct maps, and verify poll worker eligibility,” elections attorney Sambo Dul wrote in Purcell’s brief.

That backs up an argument made in court by county elections staff, who said it would take 14 weeks for an outside group to audit the systems and figure out the best way to split them.

Purcell would know, Dul argues, because she oversaw the creation of the integrated IT system during her tenure in office, which lasted from 1989 to 2017.

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'Purcell Principle'

Beyond the IT issue, Blaney’s order also has ramifications for which office — the recorder or the board’s elections staff — control different responsibilities.

Some of those tasks were already clearly delineated by state law. For instance, both sides agree the recorder is in charge of voter registration and signature verification on early ballots.

But the ruling throws dozens of other responsibilities into question and flies in the face of the way state law has been interpreted in the county for decades, Purcell argues.

She said the most immediate concern should not be who prevails in the court case but whether Blaney’s order creates too many changes with weeks to go before the primary, which could cause confusion for voters and election workers.

“The biggest thing is should we do something or should we implement something right now before an election and what are the consequences?” Purcell told KJZZ.

To defend that position, Purcell points to the U.S. Supreme Court precedent that carries her name.

The so-called “Purcell Principle” was established in 2006, after the justices in October that year reversed an appeals court decision that nullified an Arizona voter ID law in order to avoid changing the state’s election rules immediately before the upcoming November election.

“The whole thing there was you don't change the rules in midstream, particularly right before an election,” Purcell said.

Heap’s attorneys argued that principle doesn’t apply, because the current argument deals with state issues, not federal law.

“It has no direct application here, where an Arizona court is enforcing Arizona law against Arizona officials,” Heap’s attorney James Rogers wrote in a filing with the Arizona Court of Appeals.

But Purcell disagreed.

She pointed to several cases in which the Arizona Supreme Court refused to back major changes to the state's elections in weeks and months leading up to an election.

That includes the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of voters to cast ballots in 2024 even though some may not have provided proof of citizenship required by state law due to a voter registration glitch that was only discovered just months before that year’s general election.

Purcell said that making major changes at the last minute could have real consequences for both election staff, volunteers and voters.

That’s because poll worker training is done well ahead of an election.

“And that's the way you do things. You do things way in advance so you don't have any slipups,” she said.

What the law says

At the heart of the ruling is a quirk in Arizona election law, which delegates many duties to the “recorder or other officer in charge of elections” or “board of supervisors or other officer in charge of elections.”

The judge agreed with Heap that those laws should be interpreted to give the power to elected officials actually named in the law.

So, for example, any law that gives a power to the “recorder or other officer in charge of elections

But Purcell, who was in office for 27 years, argued that actually is not the case.

“That is not the way we set it up or believed at all when these laws were written from time to time,” she said.

Instead, she said the phrase “or other officer in charge” was meant to provide flexibility for counties with differing election administration models.

For instance, during her tenure, Purcell said the recorder handled nearly all election functions in Maricopa County, while some other counties used a system where the board and recorder ran elections together.

“So we were working with that every time we introduced or supported any kind of legislation,” she said. “And the main thing, you don't want to hurt the rest of the state because Maricopa is doing it one way and can because of their administration, but the other counties cannot.”

Purcell said those laws were designed to allow a board of supervisors and recorder to collaboratively reach an agreement to split responsibilities in a way that makes sense for their county — the type of agreement common in Maricopa County before Heap and the current board took office.

She said lawmakers didn’t contemplate a situation in which a recorder and board openly fought over those duties and could not figure out how to work together.