Embattled Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap got a legal win last week. A judge said the Board of Supervisors should not have taken away computer specialists from the Recorder’s Office — an important detail in the ongoing fight between Heap and the Board over who gets to control what parts of county elections.
The decision comes after Votebeat's Sasha Hupka got a hold of some internal emails that raise serious questions about Heap’s involvement with federal officials as they investigate the 2020 and 2022 elections — and seek Arizona voter information.
Hupka joined The Show in the studio to talk more about it.
Full conversation
SASHA HUPKA: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming in. OK, so let's begin with this news of the judge's decision. This is a win for Heap.
SASHA HUPKA: This is on the technical side, at least. It definitely is a win for Heap. I think you saw that there were certain areas that the judge sort of sidestepped or carved out in favor of the board, in particular, some of their budgetary authority. But definitely on the technical side, this is a win.
LAUREN GILGER: Tell us a little bit about the details. What did the judge find here?
SASHA HUPKA: So the biggest thing that I think maybe people will most immediately sort of understand, because a lot of this is about the minutia of election administration, right? But I would say the biggest thing for Heap is that he gets to take back some of his IT staff that under the version of the agreement that former Recorder Stephen Richer signed with the board last year. Or, excuse me, in 2024, he didn't have they took that, and they put it under the board that now has to go back with him.
I think that the agreement also kind of on the more statutory level. It clarifies where everybody's supposed to go. So everybody's now going to fair statutory corners, right? This ruling says, if this law says the board or other officer in charge of elections, that means the Legislature intended for this to be with the board, unless they voluntarily agree to give it up, and vice versa. If it says the recorder, other officer in charge of elections. That means they intended it to be with the recorder.
But what I actually think is the most interesting part about this whole ruling is not necessarily what it decides. It's partly how it discusses the dispute. To this point, it was scathing for the board. There are parts of it where the judge talks about how he did not see, at least within his courtroom, that the board was willing to cooperate, and how he felt that the recorder side was much more willing to cooperate.
And that's really interesting, because from what we've seen publicly outside the courtroom, the board kind of made this whole song and dance of forcing Heap in front of them to testify, and their stated reasoning for that was that he wasn't answering their questions. And so I think there's a little bit of a disconnect between what you see in the judge's ruling in this dispute versus maybe what we've seen on the outside.
And then, of course, you know, there's kind of the broader ripple effects of this. I've always thought that this fight, you know, it's about these very minute details of election administration, but really it's about election power and it's about election control. And I think that this fight has had very real impacts on just election trust and confidence and really putting voters in a weird position where they're sort of now picking sides, yeah, in a way that's really harmful.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and I want to talk more about that in a moment, but remind us for a moment, Sasha, how this all began. Because this started before Heap came into office.
SASHA HUPKA: It did. So sort of the crux of this, right, is Richer and the board in October, November, timeframe, 2024, sort of right before the general election in 2024, they signed a new iteration of this agreement. Now, this agreement has been around for a while. I believe the initial version was signed by Adrian Fontes back when he was the Maricopa County recorder. Obviously he's now secretary of state.
And so it sort of existed in some form or fashion, and sort of been remodeled incrementally over the years, but they signed this agreement, and when he came into office, he pretty immediately said, I feel that my power has been wrongly taken from me my power over elections. I think it's important to note on Heap, too, at the same time as they were signing this agreement, right, Heap was campaigning for office. He had beaten Richer in the primary, and Heap was largely supported by allies of President Donald Trump, who have cast doubt repeatedly on election results. So you could maybe call him an election skeptic or election denier adjacent.
And so that's sort of the crux of all of this, is that fundamental disagreement. But again, I think it's about more than just the agreement itself. It's also about what it represents symbolically in this like time period that our country is in, in democracy.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it really does. It really does mean a lot right now, I want to turn to another big story that you had out recently about Heap and his potential cooperation, at least communication, with the Department of Justice, which is investigating now Arizona's past elections, also to do with these questions of election denialism.
What did you find?
SASHA HUPKA: The emails were really revelatory. What we found was that he appeared to be or at least the email suggested that he was coordinating with the federal government. There were three main things in the email.
Specifically, one was that there was a point within this correspondence and this documentation where he expressed support for the investigations into his own county's elections. You know, the efforts by the Trump administration to look into the 2020 election in Maricopa County. You saw the FBI subpoena documents from the Arizona Senate. You saw, you know, HSI, which is an arm of DHS, asking the attorney general's office for certain documents related to the 2020 election. And so he expressed support for that in this correspondence.
The other thing is that he met with the district attorney for the state of Arizona, the top federal prosecutor in the state, and we don't know what they talked about, but the timing is really interesting, because this came as the DOJ was threatening to sue the state to obtain its voter rolls, and they ultimately later did.
But right after that meeting, like within weeks after it, you see the DOJ suddenly send a litigation hold, not only to the state, but also to the county, saying that they're concerned that the county is going to delete records from 2020 and 2022, which was a concern that he had raised with the county just prior to that meeting that he had with that top federal prosecutor.
And so you start to kind of get a picture right based on timing that this very heavily suggests he was coordinating.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, last 30 seconds. Then bring this home for us. Sasha, I mean, like you said, this raises a lot of questions about voter trust heading into an election that's rapidly approaching.
SASHA HUPKA: I think voters have a right to know what their elected politicians are doing, and I think these emails shed a lot of light on that. I also think that, you know, with this ongoing fight, and with a lot of the actions right, you see maybe Heap taking with the feds, and the feds taking in Maricopa County, and in Arizona, you're seeing federal interference potentially that really casts a lot of doubt around these elections, and we've seen what the consequences of that were in 2020.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, OK. Sasha Hupka with Votebeat. Thank you so much
SASHA HUPKA: Thank you.
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