The election-skeptic county recorder just lost his first court battle

America loves a loser. At least, Justin Heap better hope so.

Since taking office as Maricopa County recorder in January, the MAGA-aligned Heap has waged a bitter power struggle with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which is controlled by members of his own party. Heap, whose office handles mail ballots and voter registration, claims the board is handicapping his ability to do his job. The board — particularly board chair Thomas Galvin — has essentially (but not literally) said Heap is full of shit.

After committing a series of blunders in his first few months in office, Heap raised the stakes by suing the board on June 12, claiming the board was not negotiating in good faith over a Shared Services Agreement that delineates election duties between the recorder and the county elections department. More recently, Heap’s office asked a judge to issue a preliminary injunction to halt a planned third-party audit of county IT systems — an audit that the board has noted Heap originally requested.

Thursday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney sent Heap’s argument home packing. In a short ruling that followed a hearing earlier in the week, Blaney denied the preliminary injunction, giving Heap his first official loss in court.

“This is the right outcome,” attorney Kory Langhofer, who is representing the board, wrote in an email to New Times. “Honestly, it wasn’t a close call.”

It’s not clear if Heap will appeal the ruling. The Recorder’s Office did not respond to a request to comment.

Heap has felt targeted by his fellow Republicans on the board since before he took office. The previous recorder, centrist Republican Stephen Richer, had signed away some of the recorder’s office’s responsibilities and IT infrastructure in a lame duck SSA in the months before he left office. Heap canceled that deal once he took over, and has been at loggerheads with the board of supervisors ever since.

In June, Heap sued the board, rankling Republican county attorney Rachel Mitchell. Heap did not seek permission from Mitchell to hire his attorney in the case, James Rogers of America First Legal, setting off a fight about whether Rogers can actually represent him. Rogers has continued to represent Heap in this case. Neither Mitchell nor Rogers responded to New Times’ request to comment.

Injunction fight

Rogers filed the motion for a preliminary injunction last month to attempt to stop an IT audit by The Intersect Group, which the board had hired through a request-for-proposal process. The motion argued that the audit was “nothing more than a vehicle to seize control of the systems and databases at issue in this case,” and added that his team was left out of the meetings and the audit process. He asked the court to prevent The Intersect Group from beginning the audit.

The board fired back that Heap has asked for a similar audit of the county’s election systems in a January budget proposal, decrying Heap’s “schizophrenic positioning” that “ensnares the County in a Catch-22.” “No one has ever purported to obstruct the Recorder’s participation in the assessment,” the county wrote in response to the injunction request.

Heap also alleged that the auditors would be able to “read, copy, or alter confidential voter information.” The board rejected that as false because The Intersect Group had been “carefully vetted,” had signed an NDA and were subject to the same background checks that “have long applied to temporary employees whom Maricopa County hires directly to assist on voter registration matters.”

In his ruling, Blaney expressed concern over the protection of voters’ information during the audit, but said he was “credibly informed” that the board had taken proper privacy precautions. As such, Blaney found that Heap’s argument did not show the possibility of “irreparable injury,” which is required to issue such an injunction.

“Today’s ruling is a win for Maricopa County voters and anyone who values election integrity,” Galvin wrote in a statement after the ruling. “It confirms that the assessment is safe and being conducted in a manner that will allow the important work of elections to continue while protecting the security of voter information.”

On X, Richer couldn’t help but take a shot at his successor.

The Intersect Group estimates its audit of the county’s Voter Registration Automation System will take 14 weeks to complete. The system includes the voter registration system, ballot information, signature verification and curing for mail-in ballots, to name a few. The audit is not expected to be done until after the 2026 primaries, which Heap’s lawsuit claimed effectively denies his “statutory authority for the duration of his term” and is “puzzling, unnecessary, and wasteful of taxpayer dollars.” 

The total project is expected to cost the county roughly $300,000.