MAGA county recorder Justin Heap publicly embarrassed himself again

Before you send something out into the wide world for all of God’s creation to read, it’s important to check it for accuracy. Justin Heap, the Republican election skeptic who keeps bumbling around as Maricopa County Recorder, has now forgotten that at least twice.

Last year, his office mistakenly sent notices to 83,000 voters, erroneously informing them that their voter registrations would be canceled. Though the screw-up started with a third-party printer, emails show that a Recorder’s Office staffer approved the mailers before they were sent. The day the mistake was revealed, Phoenix New Times previously reported, Heap was not in the office at all.

Thursday, Heap did it again. This time, he publicized a sassy letter that he’d sent to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the Republican-led body with whom Heap has been sparring over election duties for the past year. In the letter, Heap lambasted the board’s suggestion of early voting sites for the 2026 primary elections, criticizing those sites as inequitably placed around the Valley and rejecting them in favor of his own (as yet unannounced) picks. In the process, Heap again managed to be publicly and quite embarrassingly wrong.

Attached to the letter, which Heap blasted out to the media in a press release, were a list and a map of 25 proposed early voting sites suggested by the Maricopa County Elections Department, which the supervisors oversee. The list of sites gave Heap “serious concerns,” he wrote in his letter, claiming they would make voting “inconvenient and inaccessible for a large number of Maricopa County voters.” He critiqued the sites’ “highly uneven distribution,” noting that Tempe had three proposed early voting sites while much more populous Mesa had only one.

“This kind of imbalance makes voting more difficult in large portions of the county and risks leaving a substantial percentage of county voters without reasonable access to voting,” Heap wrote. “Elections should be fair and accessible for everyone, regardless of where they live. I cannot support a plan that does not provide all voters a reasonably equal opportunity to vote.”

It was a bold statement, a vociferous defense of voter access. Except that, as Heap apparently didn’t realize, his map omitted the majority of potential early voting sites the county is proposing.

The potential voting sites were sent to the board in spreadsheet form, along with a letter from Scott Jarrett, the Maricopa County Election Director. “The excel document includes three tabs,” Jarrett wrote. The first, he said, “shows the locations that have agreed to be an early voting location.” Those were the locations Heap put on his map. Oh, but the second tab! That one “shows the locations that have agreed to be an Emergency/Election Day location or that we are waiting on confirmation of their participation,” Jarrett wrote, adding that “all locations on the second tab were asked if they would be willing to serve as an early voting location, so some of the locations that show a ‘waiting’ designation may inform us that they want to be an early voting location.”

That means the board suggested far more early voting locations than Heap let on in his letter — 160 of them, according to the board. That’s further underscored by Jarrett’s letter, which notes that in the last primary, the county elections department opened 12 initial early voting locations, “and then opened approximately 40-45 more” as early voting progressed. That suggests that the board would have sent over far more than the 25 early voting sites Heap blasted as insufficient.

Of course, Heap’s letter didn’t mention that. Whether that was an omission of ignorance or Heap was being purposefully misleading remains to be seen. His office did not respond to questions on the subject from New Times. Either way, that flub turned his grandstanding letter into a real Zoolander-esque moment. What is this? Voting centers for ants?

Heap’s sparring partners on the board of supervisors were quick to point out his error.

“Bless his heart,” wrote Republican supervisor Thomas Galvin on social media. “He didn’t open all the tabs on the Excel spreadsheet. Swing and a miss, Justin.”

Supervisor Debbie Lesko — herself a staunch Trump supporter and a Heap ally until she started dealing with him on a regular basis — summed up the whole saga in a tweet:

“1. Heap demands early in-person voting. 2. We give it to him. 3. We send Heap list of over 160 sites he can use or modify. 3. Heap apparently doesn’t open all site spreadsheet tabs and rejects ‘our plan’. 4. We didn’t even send him a plan…just a list of voting sites. 5. 🥺”

Heap appears to now be on his own to conduct early voting for the 2026 primary, which will feature significant races for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and several soon-to-open congressional seats. In a statement from Lesko and board chair Kate Brophy McGee — again, both Republicans, like Heap — they made it clear that if Heap doesn’t want their help, he won’t get it. “We offered to help him because he’s never done it before, and time is of the essence,” they wrote, adding that they “can’t force him to accept our assistance.” They went on to call Heap’s letter “misleading and disappointing.”

Exactly what you want to see from the guy in charge of early voting in one of the most electorally consequential counties in the country. Early voting is just months away. Hopefully the county recorder will learn how to operate a spreadsheet by then.