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For the third time in as many elections, Maricopa County voters will choose a new recorder this year in a hotly contested race centered around election integrity.
On Nov. 5, voters will pick between a Democratic newcomer who says the need for improvements in the county’s elections doesn’t warrant a free fall into conspiracy theories and a first-term Republican state representative who said the county’s elections have made Maricopa a “national laughing stock” and who supports total hand counts.
State Rep. Justin Heap, R-Mesa, has consistently skirted questions asking whether he believes the 2020 and 2022 elections in the county were stolen from top-of-the-ticket Republicans. Instead, he has repeatedly answered that he wants to restore Arizonans’ eroded trust in their elections.
“If voters can’t trust the system, they will simply walk away and stop voting and voters of all parties — this isn’t limited to the Republicans in the primary — this is Republicans, Democrats, independents all report large numbers who do not have confidence in the system,” Heap told “Arizona Horizon” host Ted Simons in a June interview. “That is a product of how we run the system, not of any misinformation that is spread online.”
During his time in the House, Heap has backed several bills aimed at fixing the perceived issues that Republicans who openly claim without evidence that the elections won by Democrats are marred by fraud — including many of his legislative colleagues — claim exist. They have consistently failed to prove any allegations of malfeasance in the elections.
Those include proposed laws that would ban electronic tabulation of ballots and force hand counts, and that would eliminate the option to vote early for most Arizonans.
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A member of the state legislature’s far-right Freedom Caucus, Heap was recruited to run for county recorder by the head of the caucus, Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, one of the fake electors in the plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona to keep Donald Trump in the White House.
Heap’s Democratic opponent, Tim Stringham, told the Arizona Mirror that his time helping to promote democracy and fair elections as a human rights lawyer for the U.S. Navy in places like Nigeria, inspired him to run for office back home.
“I’m somebody who volunteered to go overseas to try to build democratic institutions, to try to build support for human rights — including elections — and tried to advise other countries on elections and democratic rule and peaceful transition of power,” Stringham said.
But he said he was also spurred to run by his fear that Heap would defeat incumbent Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer in the Republican primary.
Justin Heap and Tim Stringham. Photos by Michael Chow/Cheryl Evans | Arizona Republic/pool photos
Richer lost to Heap after facing ongoing hate and ridicule from his own party over the past four years, as he refuted claims of election fraud and insisted that the county’s elections were free, fair and transparent.
Stringham told “Arizona Horizon” that he would have dropped out of the race if Richer had won.
While he does not believe that past elections in Maricopa County were stolen, Stringham said that he doesn’t take every government claim at face value.
But Stringham made clear that he doesn’t believe in the kinds of conspiracy theories spread by people like Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who still insists that she won the 2022 election for Arizona governor.
Lake officially endorsed Heap in March, and Heap said he was proud to have her backing.
Richer and Lake are in the midst of a civil defamation lawsuit for Lake’s false claims that Richer was responsible for 300,000 “illegal, invalid, phony or bogus” early ballots being counted in Maricopa County, causing Lake to lose the race for governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs. In March, Lake conceded to the court that her statements were false.
“If you’re going to run on fixing the lies and half-truths, you damn sure shouldn’t be accepting Kari Lake’s endorsement,” Stringham said.
Heap has accused high-priced, out-of-state political consultants and the “Democrat-controlled media” of spreading lies and half-truths about him.
Heap did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. He also declined to participate in two debates with Stringham.
Stringham said he absolutely believes that Heap’s insistence that Arizonans don’t trust their elections is contributing to their distrust.
“I think when you’re actually in the Recorder’s Office, you only have so many precious tax dollars and employees’ time that you can spend addressing conspiracy theories, which is different than the time you genuinely need to be spending addressing true, heartfelt concerns people have,” Stringham said.
Policy proposals
The Maricopa County recorder oversees voting by mail, maintains the county’s voter rolls and records documents like plats and deeds.
Neither Heap nor Stringham have put forward detailed policy proposals. Stringham has said that he wants to get into office and learn the ropes before making changes, adding that his primary goal will be to follow strict and complicated state and federal election laws, maintain the voter rolls and ensure that citizens can vote and noncitizens cannot.
During a Sept. 12 Clean Elections debate, Stringham said that the Recorder’s Office could improve its processes with the use of technology to catch fraudulent deeds before they’re recorded.
Heap told the Arizona Republic that he also believes that processes for the recording of titles and deeds should be improved so that owners are notified when changes are made to their property, to help catch fraud.
Maricopa County already has a free title alert system that notifies anyone who signs up when a document is recorded in their name, or the name of their business. The system was launched in 2023 and 70,000 people have signed up for it.
Heap’s other promises include improving voter roll maintenance, which he’s claimed Richer failed to do, and providing faster election results.
“For heaven’s sake, we need our election results by election night,” Heap said during a Trump rally in Glendale on Aug. 23.
But the recorder doesn’t have the power to provide faster election results. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is in charge of Election Day voting, as well as tabulation of ballots.
And Arizona has never provided official results on election night. But as the state has shifted from a place where Republicans won consistently into a battleground state, with tightly contested races up and down the ballot that aren’t decided until several days after the election as ballot-counting is finalized, the lack of immediate results has become a point of contention for Republicans.
Tammy Patrick, an employee of longtime Republican Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell for 11 years, and the current CEO for programs at Election Center, told the Mirror that one of the challenges surrounding elected election administration roles is that the candidates aren’t always cognizant of the limits to their office’s power.
“It’s easy when you’re on the outside looking in to believe that you have better ways of doing things, but once you get in and see the complexity of what it means to conduct an election, it’s never as simple as people believe,” Patrick said.
She said she thinks that both Richer and Adrian Fontes, the Democratic now-secretary of state who preceded Richer in the office, learned that the hard way.
“I think the politics of election administration make it easy to cast doubt and aspersions and it’s much more difficult to come up with legitimate ways to improve the system until you actually understand everything that’s already in place to enforce the legitimacy of the process,” Patrick said.
Who are the candidates?
Both Stringham and Heap are attorneys and Arizona natives. Stringham graduated from Arizona State University before joining the Army and doing a tour in Afghanistan in 2012. He then received his law degree from Notre Dame and became a human rights attorney for the Navy. He’s still a member of the Navy Reserve.
Heap also received his undergraduate degree from ASU, and his law degree from the university’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. His campaign website says he’s a former prosecutor and civil liberties attorney, and he currently owns his own law firm in Mesa. He’s served as a state representative since 2023, where he was the vice-chairman of the Ways and Means Committee as well as a member of the Elections Committee.
Just after he took office in January 2023, Heap came under fire for an email he sent asking a lobbyist who requested a meeting with him if the lobbyist or their clients had donated to his campaign. Heap said he needed to prioritize his meetings, seeming to indicate that he was doing so based on who donated to his campaign.
Heap claimed that he met with the lobbyist anyway, but the lobbyist said that wasn’t true and public records do not back up his story.
“He has distinguished himself as a principled leader and a fierce advocate for limited government and conservative principles,” Heap says on his campaign website.
In 2010, less than a year after he was admitted to practice law in Arizona, Heap was hired by the Maricopa County public defender’s office, and then fired three months later, KJZZ reported.
The reason for his termination isn’t clear, but a letter from the head of the office at the time obtained by the public radio station said it was due to “unsatisfactory completion” of his probationary period.
What’s at stake
The possibility that someone who doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of elections — and is endorsed by election deniers — being voted into an election administration position is troubling to election experts.
That scenario has already played out when election deniers were elected as county election officials in Montana and Colorado.
Cascade County, Montana was plagued with election problems after election denier Sandra Merchant took office in 2023. County commissioners have since voted to revoke Merchant’s election duties.
Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk was sentenced to 9 years in prison on Thursday for participating in a scheme to breach secure equipment in her own elections office in 2021 in an attempt to find evidence that Colorado’s voting system was rigged.
“I think no matter what role a person has in the process, if they don’t believe in the legitimacy of finalized audited elections, it’s difficult to know for sure how they would behave in the future, and if they would try to leverage that position in some sort of outsized role,” Patrick said.
She went on to promise voters that there are safeguards in place to ensure that no single election official wields outsized power.
“But in the meantime you can have chaos be sown, and that’s never good for the trust and confidence in the system overall,” Patrick said.
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