It’s a new year, there’s a new slate of leaders taking office here in Maricopa County and one of their first moves is already raising eyebrows.
Former Congresswoman Debbie Lesko didn’t run for reelection to her seat in Washington last year, instead she ran for and won a seat on the County Board of Supervisors and, as soon as she was sworn in Monday, she announced she wants a new audit of county elections.
It’s a flashback to controversial audits of years past, even though new Board Chair Thomas Galvin promised it wouldn’t be a repeat of the discredited audit completed by Cyber Ninjas after the 2020 election.
Sasha Hupka has been covering it for The Arizona Republic and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning there, Sasha.
SASHA HUPKA: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So tell us more about this proposal for a new audit of county elections. Why do the Republicans on the board at least want to do it?
HUPKA: Well, their argument is essentially that this is just a check to make sure that everything's going well, there's nothing that can be improved upon, you know, is there any way that we can do our elections better? But I think what's notable here is that one, I think this really marks a shift in the board and in its attitude toward election administration, which is something that we've seen them generally have a really unified front on in recent years.
And two, they've already done several reviews of this nature. So I think what's kind of left to see is what is the actual full scope of this review, because those details weren't clear yesterday even though they promised that this wasn't going to be a Cyber Ninjas-esque audit.
GILGER: Right, so more to learn on, on how this will actually look. But talk more about that. You talked about this in your reporting that this marks a definitive shift in what the county leaders have said and done about election administration. Like this comes after years of former Board of Supes leaders, you know, staunchly defending elections in Maricopa County, sometimes to the extent that they were facing death threats, harassment.
HUPKA: Yeah, I mean, this is something that past supervisors have spent years really rejecting, and it's, it's a topic that pushed some of them into a national limelight. I think that what you really need to look at here is those three of the five seats on the board that changed hands. That's the most that have changed hands since the 1990s.
And two of those new supervisors Mark Stewart and Debbie Lesko, they campaigned on platforms that included election integrity. They're both Republicans. We saw that that red wave that really was a theme nationally continued down ballot, so Republicans took all three of these seats, and I think that they are definitely going to be interesting voices to have on this board that historically has had this unified stance, particularly because, you know, this is a young board that's currently trying to figure out how are they actually going to work together and what is their, you know, era, so to speak, going to look like. Yesterday was the first test of that.
GILGER: Right. So this is a largely new board. There's just one Democrat left on it. The two new members that you mentioned, are they election deniers? Like, what have they said about elections in Maricopa County?
HUPKA: So I think that, you know, to call somebody election denier, it kind of depends on, you know, how are you using that term, right? I think that Stewart maybe has not directly denied the results of past elections, but he has definitely criticized the board's handling of past elections.
Lesko is in a little bit of a different boat, I think in her case you maybe could call her a denier because she voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election when she was a congresswoman in the House of Representatives on January 6, 2021, almost four years ago today. So you know she is kind of in a slightly different category.
And then that third newcomer, that's Republican Kate Brophy McGee, she has said that she was confident in the results of recent elections, but she's also kind of indicated that she's willing to consider proposed election policy reforms, and I think she's going to be a very crucial swing vote on that board. Galvin, you know, he and Democrat Steve Gallardo, who you also mentioned, they've kind of stood with the rest of the old board in terms of projecting this unified stance. And so they have a little bit more on the record as to exactly where they stand on some of these decisions.
GILGER: Maricopa County also just elected a new recorder, Justin Heap, who's replacing Steven Richer, who also kind of became famous for his staunch defense of elections here. Do you think it looks like we're going to see changes to elections in this county under these new leaders? Like, what else are they pushing for?
HUPKA: Yeah, I think that in terms of the actual proposed review, we don't know yet if that will include the Recorder's Office or not, but he is a very interesting figure, and he is someone who potentially could have a lot of power over elections. He has said repeatedly that he really would like to redo the election operations agreement between the Recorder’s Office and the Board of Supervisors and that's the agreement that divvies up what everybody is responsible for in terms of running elections. He has said he wants to redo that.
The board actually just signed a new agreement with reporter Steven Richer in October. He said it was shortsighted for them to do it so close to the end of their terms, and he now would like to redo it somehow.
I think the question is, you know, can he get a majority of the board to actually do that? That's kind of still up in the air. Stewart and Lesko have indicated that they're willing. Kate Brophy McGee has kind of been a little bit more wishy-washy on that, and then Galvin and Gallardo have said that they, you know, are open to talking with him but are not looking for changes here.
And then I think the other question is if he does manage to get a majority on board with that, you know, what do the changes he actually wants look like? I think he hasn't been really clear about exactly what powers he would seek to take back from the board, and, you know, that could make a really big difference in terms of how viable this is and what the impacts actually are.
