Republican Justin Heap announces his run for Maricopa County recorder on Feb. 28, 2024, outside the Arizona State Capitol. Heap defeated the current recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, in the August primary after claiming that Richer ran “the worst election in history” in 2022. Photo by Jen Fifield | Votebeat
Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap on Wednesday told legislative Republicans that election officials in rural counties often opposed their election reform proposals due to a dearth of staff and resources. And then those lawmakers did something they rarely do when hearing it from the counties themselves: They believed him.
But Heap, who was sworn in as recorder only nine days earlier, was repeating the exact arguments that the Arizona Association of Counties had been making to many of the same lawmakers for years. Before Heap, a former Republican state representative and member of the Legislature’s far-right Freedom Caucus delivered the message, lawmakers had brushed off the concerns of the state’s less populated counties as unserious.
“When you’re in the Legislature, that’s usually the government’s objection to most things, so it kind of comes across more as a trope than a serious point,” Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, told the Arizona Mirror, adding that lawmakers often rolled their eyes at claims that some proposals were not feasible in some counties.
Heap on Wednesday afternoon shared what he said he’d recently learned were the counties’ concerns during the first meeting of the House Ad Hoc Committee on Election Integrity and Florida-style Voting Systems, which Kolodin chairs.
Heap sat on the House Elections Committee for both of his years as a state representative, before beating Republican Stephen Richer in the Republican primary for Maricopa County Recorder in July.
“It seemed like, no matter what the bill was, how minimal the ask, how common sense that we felt it was as legislators, the Association of Counties would come in and say, ‘No,’” Heap told the committee. “That was very frustrating to me as a legislator.”
But Heap said that less than two weeks into his new role, his perspective had changed because he had spoken with county recorders from across the state.
“Legislators tend to write law as if we are talking only to Maricopa and Pima County,” Heap said on Wednesday. “We are not considering smaller counties with different situations.”
That is a point that Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, has made repeatedly to lawmakers on the Legislature’s elections committees — including Heap and Kolodin — over the past two years.
Population, funding and geography vary greatly among the Grand Canyon State’s 15 counties.
Maricopa is by far the largest county population-wise with an estimated 4.5 million residents, dwarfing even second-largest Pima County with just over 1 million residents, with Pinal County trailing in third with a population of around 480,000.
The 12 other counties that make up Arizona are much smaller, with populations ranging from Mohave County at around 233,600, Cochise County at 124,000 and tiny Greenlee county with only 9,300 residents.
Heap pointed out that lawmakers tend to have the counties that contain Phoenix and Tucson — home to the vast majority of Arizona’s voters, and therefore nearly all of the legislators — when they propose changes to state law, but county elections officials in counties with much smaller populations must implement changes in election law just the same.
For example, Heap said, when lawmakers proposed legislation that would require more paperwork or security, they knew that the larger urban counties had the staff and resources to make that happen. But Heap said he only recently learned that there are only four employees in the Apache County Recorder’s Office. Except for Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties, every recorder’s and election office in the state has eight or fewer workers.
“Smaller counties don’t have staff or budget for this,” Heap said. “Most of the pushback is not because they actually disagree but because they are concerned they don’t have the resources or ability to execute this.”
Kolodin, who was a member of the House Municipal Oversight and Elections Committee alongside Heap for two years, told Heap on Wednesday that his insights were “very useful.”
“To be honest, we’ve never really had somebody that we trusted on the other side to tell us these things in a way that we would believe them,” Kolodin said. “But having worked with you, we know that you’re not only extremely insightful, and extremely conservative, but you’re an extremely fair person who’s going to tell us things as you see them.”
Heap’s points were nearly identical to feedback from the counties that Marson has shared with the elections committees for years, and that have mostly fallen on deaf ears. The committees have worked with Marson in some cases to amend proposed legislation to bring it in line with what counties said was feasible, but they just as often ignore it.
When the Mirror asked Kolodin why, specifically, he didn’t believe Marson when she made arguments that were nearly identical to Heap’s, he said there were several reasons — including that Heap was a better communicator.
“She always seemed to present it as the counties as a whole don’t have the resources to do this or that, and we would roll our eyes,” Kolodin said, because legislators knew that wasn’t the case in Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties.
Kolodin said that, in his recollection, Marson never told lawmakers “‘it’s these specific counties, and they don’t have the resources because they’ve got four people in the office, or whatever.”
“I think Heap made that delineation more clearly, and I think that’s significant,” he said, adding that the lack of staffing resonated more with him than lack of funding.
But Marson has made precisely that argument.
During a House Municipal Oversight and Elections Committee meeting on Feb. 1, 2023, Marson explained to Kolodin, Heap and the other lawmakers on the committee why proposed legislation to allow representatives from both major political parties to observe all stages of ballot signature verification would be an issue for some of the less populated counties.
“You’ve got to just keep in mind, like, in Greenlee County, there’s three people in the entire Elections Department,” Marson said, adding that they work in a tiny room without space for additional people.
“Just for scope, it’s a very different operation in Greenlee versus Maricopa and we have to have laws that work everywhere,” she said.
And during a Senate Elections committee meeting on March 27, 2023, Marson reiterated her point about the tiny rural recorder’s offices and elections department when speaking about legislation that Kolodin proposed which would have changed the voting processes for inmates in county jails.
“Smaller counties like Navajo and Greenlee, there’s like two or three staff members, total, in that office,” Marson said.
It’s unclear if Kolodin was in the room when Marson made her comments about staffing, but he spoke to the committee about his bill directly after she and then-Sen. Ken Bennett, a fellow Republican and former Secretary of State, reiterated her point.
“We’ve got some pretty small elections departments in some of our rural counties,” Bennett told Kolodin, adding that some of the counties only have two or three full time election workers.
Kolodin also said that lawmakers on the elections committees were unclear which county employees and officials were weighing in on the Association of Counties’ policy positions, and were unsure if county recorders were the ones determining its positions on voting and election bills.
“It’s just different. It’s very different,” Kolodin said of hearing the same arguments from a former member of the Freedom Caucus. “It’s no longer a black box. It’s Representative Heap, who we know well and who we have a high opinion of.”
Marson did not respond to a request for comment.
“A lot of times, problems in politics can be solved through clear communication, and I think we’re beginning to see an example of that with Justin Heap in the recorder’s office,” Kolodin told the Mirror.
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