GOP feud! Party chair may sue recorder over ‘illegal’ mail voting plan

Last year, far-right Republican Justin Heap won the election as Maricopa County recorder by harping on election integrity. He called Arizona’s elections a laughingstock and flirted with the election denialism that has consumed his party. When he was in charge, he said, he’d secure the county’s untrustworthy elections and follow the letter of the law.

How’s that been going? Not great.

Four months into Heap’s tenure, he’s caused a widening rift with a host of fellow Republicans in the Valley, feuding with the GOP-controlled county board of supervisors and the county attorney. Now, even the chair of the Arizona Republican Party is on Heap’s ass and threatening to sue him.

At issue is a plan, floated by Heap earlier this week, to mail ballots in an upcoming special primary election to voters who have not requested them. While Heap has cast this as an effort to make voting easier — the affected voters live far from polling places, he said — his plan carries the downside of being, well, illegal. Arizona law prohibits mailing ballots to voters who are not on the Active Early Voting List or who have not requested a mail ballot in advance.

In response, other Republican county officials have dunked on him. On social media, county board chair Thomas Galvin called Heap’s plan “appalingly bad” and “bizarrely proposed,” adding that the board “won’t let Justin Heap set a bad precedent of bad election ideas!” Fellow county supervisor Debbie Lesko — hardly anti-MAGA, given that she voted against certifying the 2020 election while in Congress and has been public about voting for Heap — told a defensive Heap on X that the board “stopped you from implementing an illegal plan.”

But perhaps the strongest comments have come from state GOP chair Gina Swoboda, who told Phoenix New Times that the Arizona Republican Party “will sue” if Heap attempts to mail ballots to voters who haven’t requested them.

“People who have not requested a mail ballot should not be sent a mail ballot because it adds to confusion and it undermines the integrity and security of the process. That’s always been the position of the Republican Party of Arizona,” Swoboda said. “I’m astounded that someone who ran on election integrity can think that’s a good idea.”

Heap’s chief of staff, Sam Stone, did not return a request for comment from New Times, including about Swoboda’s threat of litigation. But Swoboda’s not wrong about Heap’s election-integrity bent. Heap concern-trolled about mail-in voting as a state legislator, voting for bills aimed at eliminating early and mail-in voting altogether. During his campaign for recorder, he called in-person voting “clearly the most secure way” to vote in an interview with Arizona’s Family.

Now he’s not only promoting a plan to mail ballots, but promoting one that would break the law.

“If we were going to just mail people a ballot based on the distance from their nearest voting location, everyone in Apache County should get a mail ballot,” Swoboda said. “If you’re sending a ballot to someone who didn’t want it, doesn’t know it’s coming and didn’t ask for it… that’s dangerous.”

Heap’s feud with other county officials in his party has been percolating for months. He fired the opening salvo by accusing the previous recorder and board of supervisors of sandbagging him by signing an agreement that stripped some authority from his office. Yet the claims he’s made about that lost authority haven’t held up to scrutiny.

Despite that, the board of supervisors has endeavored to strike a new agreement with Heap to define the relationship between the two entities, particularly when it comes to election administration. Several weeks ago, the supervisors sent Heap a proposed agreement that was the result of negotiations with his office.

After Heap accused the county supervisors of playing “childish games” to “score cheap political points" Wednesday night, Galvin reminded him that the board is still waiting for Heap to respond to its proposal. “BTW we sent you a draft Operating Agreement on April 12 and still haven’t heard back,” Galvin said. The board also voted to send a letter to Heap on April 24, following up on their proposal.

A brewing feud

Amid that backdrop, Heap’s suggestion to mail unsolicited ballots caught county supervisors off guard. The election in question is the July primary for the seat left empty by late Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in office on March 13. Grijalva’s 7th Congressional District mostly spans southern Arizona, but 57,000 voters in Maricopa County fall within it. A chunk of them live far from polling places.

At a Monday meeting, Stone laid out a plan to mail those voters ballots, whether they requested them or not. The supervisors were immediately alarmed. Galvin, Lesko and Kate Brophy McGee — all Republicans — respectively called the plan something they were “totally uncomfortable with,” a “slippery slope” and “very bad precedent.” The board, absent one member, voted unanimously to remove that proposal from the county’s primary election plan.

On Tuesday, after Stone claimed the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office had vouched for the plan’s legality, county attorney Rachel Mitchell sent Heap a letter basically calling him and Stone liars. In the letter, Mitchell wrote that not only had “no one from the Recorder’s Office requested advice from any attorney from my office on this topic,” but that the plan was clearly “unlawful.”

Mitchell went on to spell out why Heap should have known that. One of his predecessors in the office — Democrat Adrian Fontes, now the Arizona Secretary of State — had been dinged by the courts for trying to do the same thing in 2020. Afterward, the Arizona Legislature passed a law that makes it a class 5 felony for “a county recorder, city or town clerk or other election official” to “deliver or mail an early ballot to a person who has not requested an early ballot for that election.”

That would seem to clear things up, right? Wrong.

Wednesday night, Heap posted a long missive to X defending his plan. He said the board’s objection to his proposal was an attempt to “gaslight the public” and attached an image of an email from an election staffer who argued his plan was legal. That email noted that in several elections — including the 2008 primary, 2016 general and 2018 general — former Recorder Helen Purcell automatically mailed ballots to voters in precincts that are “50 voters or under” without a nearby polling location.

Swoboda says that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, calling Heap’s argument “nonsensical” and a “non sequitur.” Since 2020, she pointed out, Maricopa County has used voting centers to conduct elections. There are no “50 voters or under” precincts anymore. The law has also changed since then.

“They’re just throwing things at the wall now to find some plausible reason why they’re so far outside the law,” she said.

If Heap persists with the plan — and if his own party takes him to court over it — it will be a dramatic escalation of an intraparty fight that has reached a boil at surprising speed. (You’d think the Arizona Democratic Party would gleefully watch it play out with a bucket of popcorn, but its own internal drama is also leaking into public view.) But Swoboda pointed out a sure way to lower the temperature.

“I have no idea why he can’t just say, ‘I made a mistake,’” Swoboda said. “I’m boggled.”

At least so far, that’s not something Heap appears able to do.