MAGA county recorder gets ass thoroughly chewed out at budget meeting

On Wednesday, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap showed up to a meeting with the county board of supervisors to get his budget approved. Instead, he got an ass-chewing.

For nearly two hours, the MAGA-aligned Heap sat as multiple supervisors — including Republicans — lectured and clowned him for his office’s amateurish blunders and his persistent dishonesty as the official in charge of voter registration and early voting in the county.

“I have been let down by your office more times than I can count,” said board chair Kate Brophy McGee, a centrist Republican, at the meeting. “Your automatic response to questions is to deflect, shift the blame, put line staff out in front of the camera to explain and then go to each member’s district and spread disinformation.”

The roasting took place during what is usually a routine meeting for the board to approve supplemental budgets for the various county agencies. (Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, another Republican who has sparred with Heap and his office, presented her budget before the recorder did.) But given Heap’s many scandals — sending incorrect registration-cancellation mailers to 84,000 voters, not going in the office the day the mistake was discovered, lying about firing employees who’d actually quit and multiple public spats with the board, which has now led to an ongoing lawsuit — it’s hardly surprising the temperature would rise when it was Heap’s turn to present.

Brophy McGee grilled Heap on the stunning rate of rejected ballots during November’s off-year, all-mail election. Six thousand of the roughly 700,000 ballots were rejected for having bad signatures, a rate of 0.8% that was double that of recent elections. Heap hasn’t determined that any of the rejected ballots were fraudulent or in need of a criminal investigation, suggesting that many, if not all, of the rejected ballots were legitimate and that those voters were disenfranchised.

Brophy McGee attempted to get an answer from Heap on how to prevent ballots from being rejected in the upcoming midterm elections. Heap repeated the line that the office was just following signature verification procedures and showed little concern about the likelihood that people’s votes weren’t counted. 

Supervisor Thomas Galvin — also a Republican, and one of Heap’s most vociferous critics on social media — got riled when Heap claimed that he came into office “with less power than any recorder in living memory.” (Heap’s office sued the board over claims that the board was preventing it from performing its statutory election duties.) Galvin participated in the meeting by phone, and when Heap floated that claim, he couldn’t help but interrupt.

“Justin Heap is literally lying,” Galvin said. “I was gonna stay quiet, but this guy just continued to lie over and over again.”

The hardest grilling came from Supervisor Steve Gallardo, the board’s lone Democrat. Last year, Votebeat obtained texts showing that Heap had claimed to have Gallardo’s support for toppling Galvin, who was serving as chair at the time. Gallardo publicly blasted Heap in response and asked the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to investigate the recorder.

On Wednesday, Gallardo laid into Heap for the deeply partisan social media posts his chief of staff, Sam Stone, spends his time authoring during work hours. Stone — who has been Heap’s right-hand man since the beginning of Heap’s disaster-filled term one year ago, and who sat next to Heap at the budget meeting — regularly shits on Democrats, pushes far-right talking points and trades outlandish takes on the platform. 

Gallardo referenced several Stone post at the meeting. In August 2025, Stone wrote, “Democrats have spent the last 9 months denying elections and claiming every yo-yo conspiracy on the planet.” A month later, he wrote, “lots of Democrats in violation of their oath. Should be tossed (from) office.” In October, Stone called elected Democrats “ENEMIES of truth, liberty, freedom, and the American Way.” Later that same month, he wrote, “Truly amazing how historically illiterate you have to be to vote for Democrats.” 

In fact, the same day of the meeting — less than 30 minutes before it started — Stone wrote that “we all have to pick sides in the coming civil war.” He added a shrug emoji.

Gallardo wasn’t shrugging.

“How are voters supposed to have confidence in your ability to run elections when your leadership staff is saying this stuff?” Gallardo said. “This is disgraceful.”

Gallardo didn’t name Stone directly, instead referring to him as a member of Heap’s “leadership staff.” Gallardo, who spent 14 years working for the Maricopa County Elections Department before seeking elected office in the early 2000s, said former Recorder Helen Purcell would have “fired my ass” for putting out these kinds of statements. 

“I have been here 10 years, and I have worked with so many county-wide elected officials,” Gallardo said. “I have never seen anyone in this county in a leadership position put out this type of statement. Never.” 

Heap feigned innocence when confronted with these tweets from this chief of staff, claiming that he’s never seen them and Gallardo hadn’t “identified the member of my leadership team that you’re speaking of.” (At least as of Thursday afternoon, it was true that Heap doesn’t follow Stone on X, where Stone makes his frequent incendiary remarks.) Instead, Heap contended that everything he’s done has “shown nothing but impartiality,” and suggested that the tweets of former recorders Adrian Fontes and Stephen Richer should also be examined.

That drew a blistering response from Richer on X. Heap’s predecessor shot back that Heap should “find me the tweets where I bash a single elected official on anything except attacking our office.” Richer also added “that elected officials have different rules than staff. I’d imagine that’s the same reason why Justin can work 1 out of every 5 days.”

Regardless of whether Heap was aware of Stone’s shitposting, Gallardo said county officials need to ensure that they’re “not using taxpayer resources to influence the outcome of elections.” Gallardo said he hopes Stone “took the day off when he tweeted this stuff out,” but added, “he’s doing it on government hours.” In fact, all four of the posts Gallardo mentioned during the meeting were made during business hours on a weekday.

Gallardo added that Stone’s tweets might dissuade Democratic voters from seeking help from the Recorder’s Office over a ballot issue.

“How do you expect me to vote for this budget knowing your leadership team thinks this about a third of registered voters in Maricopa County?” he said. “How are Democrats supposed to feel with the confidence of the office when they’re reading this?” 

Facing such an onslaught, Heap got defensive. He told the board he was “a little embarrassed at this personal assassination attempt dropped in a budget proposal,” suggesting that Gallardo could set up a time to talk about his concerns with the office. That didn’t seem to convince anyone. 

Both Galvin and Brophy McGee acknowledged the validity of Gallardo’s concerns. Galvin asked Heap to either meet Gallardo “halfway” or promise to “look into it and resolve it.” Brophy McGee, in a somewhat stunning remark for a Republican, warned that Stone’s tweets carry the danger of “making your office appear or be perceived as the political arm of the far-right Republican Party.”

The board has taken Heap’s proposed budget under advisement and has not yet voted on it. In a press release after the meeting, Heap got back on his high horse and lectured the board for its supposed unprofessionalism. He wrote that he was “deeply disappointed” by the board’s “juvenile temper tantrum,” which he said “was unbecoming and beneath the decorum demanded of Arizona’s elected leaders, but sadly not unexpected.”

“This embarrassing incident clearly demonstrates why my office’s lawsuit was necessary,” Heap wrote, “and why good faith negotiations have not been possible with a Board who puts personal vendettas and unhinged political gamesmanship above the wishes of the voters.”

As Republican consultant Barrett Marson noted on X, the release was initially dated Jan. 26, two days before the meeting took place. Either Heap’s office was sloppy with the details, or it had been working on shaping the narrative of his tongue-lashing before it even happened.

It’s another misstep for Heap’s weighty file, as Galvin seemed to sum up during the meeting.

“It was really unfortunate to see the Recorder’s Office spend the last year engaging in political games, lying about a lot of different things and not concentrating on the task at hand,” Galvin said. “Which is the reason why they seem to be careening from one disaster to another month by month.”