Fallout continues over dispute between Maricopa County recorder and Board of Supervisors

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap has been trying to claw back some elections powers from the County Board of Supervisors, and he pressured two members of the board to support him in it.

It’s all spelled out in a series of text messages that Votebeat reporter Jen Fifield obtained via a public records request.

Now, the lone Democrat on the board is calling for an investigation as the fallout continues.

Fifield joined The Show to speak more about it.

Jen Fifield

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: So Jen, these text messages are really kind of rocking the political world right now. Lots of chatter about what was in them. Tell us what they spell out. 

JEN FIFIELD: Well, they really look at what was happening behind the scenes as the supervisors and recorder tried to negotiate who controls what over Maricopa County elections.

And so it was the recorder, Justin Heap, trying to convince two of the supervisors to give him what he wanted, what control he wanted over elections.

GILGER: One of the exchange urges in particular is making a lot of noise in which the recorder says, even I hope we don't get a public records request for these text messages, right?

FIFIELD: Right. And so what happened was he was trying to convince two of the board members, Mark Stewart and Debbie Lesko, to go around the chairman, Thomas Galvin, and he was trying to tell them that he had the support of Democrat Steve Gallardo on the board, even though we found a later Gallardo says he did not tell him that.

So basically he said, don't ask me what kind of arm twisting I had to do to get the Democrat on the board.

GILGER: We'll get into more of the reaction from Gallardo in a moment, but back up for a moment, Jen, and just talk about the context here, because this goes back a little ways in the political kind of battle between the county Board of Supervisors and the county recorder. Tell us the history. 

FIFIELD: Well, managing elections is super complicated. Unfortunately, we split it between two different parties in Arizona. And so there's always been a challenge. When Adrian Fontes was the recorder, the supervisors noticed that he made a mistake in 2018 and started to take some power away from him. Then when Stephen Richer was elected, saying that Fontes had made errors, they had trouble behind the scenes again trying to figure out who did what over technology and all these different issues that they run. So this goes back multiple recorders. It's not just with Heap.

GILGER: Right. But the board did change some of the rules again and take away additional powers from the county recorder not long before he was elected. Right. 

FIFIELD: Right. So, Stephen Richer and Justin Heap faced off in the primary last summer. And when Heap won, that's around the time that they were renegotiate this agreement with the board taking over the IT staff, the technological staff that manages the voter rolls, anything that you have to change with the voter rolls, those staff members and that money for those staff members is now under the supervisors. And that was a major sticking point.

But what Heap said was they took all of my power. You know, he didn't say that exactly, but he basically tried to get his crowd rallied up against Chairman Galvin to try to get more power over the supervisors.

GILGER: So tell us in particular, what are the specifics here? Like what powers did they take away from the court or the recorder that he wants now?

FIFIELD: So it is mainly the technological staff that manages like the systems behind what we see in our voting. So the voter roll system where you keep all of the voter data and, then there's, a little bit of conflict over who runs the early voting. If you go in person to vote and try to get in early before Election Day, who's going to set up those polling places?

So those are the two main issues, you know. Like I said, Heap tried to make it seem like every issue was at stake here, but really it was just those two main ones.

GILGER: Were there concerns about election security, election fraud or misinformation here, Jen? 

FIFIELD: I think that Justin Heap came in and said that he wanted to revamp the system and he talked a lot about the election problems that happened on Election Day with the machines not being able to print ballots. He doesn't manage that part of elections. I believe he knew that when he took office.

But I think part of the problem here is that there's expectations for him to come in and fix every part of our system, every part of our election system that it needs fixing when he really just just runs early voting and voter registration.

GILGER: And this comes on the heels, of course, of a couple of elections in our state and really across the country, in which election denialism and lots of doubt was sowed about how accurate and hackable our elections are here, right?

FIFIELD: Right, and he really stoked those flames as he ran. And he said that, you know, the county's elections were a laughing stock. You saw that a few times. And so he was part of that movement to try to get new people in office to take over elections.

GIGLER: Okay. So the fallout from these text messages that have been released so far came pretty swiftly at the end of the week last week, and now we have Steve Gallardo, who is the lone Democrat on the county board of supes, as you said, asking the attorney general for an investigation essentially, 

FIFIELD: Yeah, he saw that text message or the text messages where he was saying that Gallardo had somehow made a deal with him for his support. And he said that he's lying. This is all lies and said that he wants Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, to look into the text messages and look into any potential deals he's talking about.

Just to be clear, he says he had absolutely no deal with Justin Heap; he had only met him one time before this.

GILGER: Any word from the AG on whether or not she will carry that out? 

FIFIELD: I reached out and they don't comment on when they're investigating, so I'm not sure if this is something that she would even investigate. He said he wants to be investigated for public corruption, so I'm not sure how that would go, but I guess we'll see how this plays out.

GILGER: Yeah. And as we're looking forward, Jen, you're still waiting for more here. What is next in the story? 

FIFIELD: So we have text from two supervisors. We don't have all of Justin Heaps' texts. So we're still looking to get those texts. And we're really still watching to see how this lawsuit plays out. And between the supervisors and the recorder. At a certain point, about a month ago, Justin Heap sued and said, no, I want more control. So now it's in the court system,

GILGER: Now it's in the courts. All right, more to come, I'm sure.