The elected Republicans who run Arizona’s largest county are accusing an election official and fellow Republican there of sowing chaos, destabilizing the democratic process, and undermining voter confidence in the midterm elections.
If that sounds like a local scuffle with minimal repercussions beyond Greater Phoenix, it isn’t: Maricopa County voters could determine control of the Arizona’s top offices including governor and attorney general, and, perhaps, Congress.
On paper, the fight is about funding, technology, and arcane elections duties. It’s more than that. The supervisors on Maricopa County’s Republican-led board say the county recorder, who is in charge of voter registration and early voting and refuses to say whether the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair, is seeking near-total control over the elections process.
They fear his legal campaign could create a pretext for far-right candidates to call into question the results of closely watched races this fall.
“This is an assault on our democratic norms and how our elections are conducted,” said Tom Galvin, one of the Republican supervisors.
So far, the recorder, Justin Heap, an ally of President Trump, is winning. Last week, the state Supreme Court delivered him another key victory.
Heap’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and his lawyer declined to be interviewed.
The bitter feud is full of twists and turns that feel ripped from the script of a wonky soap opera, complete with rancorous name-calling, threats of felony charges and a special prosecutor investigation — all as early voting in Arizona’s July 21 primary is underway.
The power struggle is a ripple from Trump’s larger battle to overturn the 2020 elections. Frustrated by electoral losses and stymied by courts, right-wing election deniers have sought to take over election offices across the country.
In Maricopa County, which is the nation’s second largest voting jurisdiction and one of its most competitive, election-related controversies have been especially potent since Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020.
Armed protesters that year repeated Trump’s false fraud claims in raucous rallies outside the county’s ballot tabulation center. The following year, a Republican-led recount drive confirmed Trump’s loss but only fueled more conspiracy theories. And in 2022, another right-wing candidate, Kari Lake, tried without success to overturn her loss in the governor contest. All the while, both Democrats and Republicans who rejected conspiracy theories have faced death threats and political challenges.
“We’re litigating 2020 again,” said Alex Gulotta, the state director for All Voting Is Local, a voting rights group. “We thought maybe we were beyond it, but we’re not.”
Local officials are bracing for another tide of attacks on the election system, as Arizona prepares for closely watched races for governor, attorney general, secretary of state and three tightly contested House seats.
The dispute dates back to a 2024 agreement between the board of supervisors and a former Maricopa County recorder, Stephen Richer, that reassigned information technology staff and some elections duties away from the recorder’s office.
Richer had repeatedly affirmed the election results of 2020 and 2022. Heap then defeated him in a Republican primary with the backing of Charlie Kirk’s Phoenix-based Turning Point USA. Furious, Heap described the deal, a routine shared services agreement that had been months in the making, as a “backroom, 11th-hour power grab” by “unpopular, lame-duck officials.”
He canceled the agreement and sought to negotiate a new one. When talks broke down, Heap hired the America First Legal Foundation, a firm founded by Stephen Miller, now the White House deputy chief of staff, to sue the board and its 4-1 Republican majority.
The suit, filed in June 2025, claimed the board was starving Heap’s office of funding and illegally taking charge of early ballot processing, ballot drop boxes, and other election functions. Galvin, then the board’s chair, said the suit was “full of falsehoods.”
Maricopa County’s top prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, another elected Republican, contested Heap’s hiring of America First Legal, arguing that her office should be representing the recorder. In a court filing, Mitchell warned that the firm was engaged in “an unprecedented power grab.”
But a county judge sided with Heap in April, ruling that the board had violated state law when it reassigned the recorder’s IT staff and funding. An appeals court blocked that decision last month. The state Supreme Court on Tuesday overruled the appeals court and ordered the rollout of Heap’s interim plan to ensure this month’s primary runs smoothly.
As the case unfolded in a courtroom, the drama outside grew more contentious. Heap’s lawyer said the supervisors and staff would face felony charges for operating ballot drop boxes and later asked a judge to hold the board in contempt and fine its members $100,000 a day.
Then video emerged of two recorder aides removing a ballot scanner from a county elections center while votes were being tallied in a local City Council race. Right-wing conspiracy theorists have long sought to obtain current election machines to inspect them for signs of fraud. The episode prompted a special prosecutor investigation into whether the employees had broken the law. Heap insisted the scanner was property of the recorder’s office and his staff needed it to prepare for the primary.
A judge ordered both sides to meet with a mediator but acknowledged that it would “be a miracle if this thing resolved outside of court.”
“The fight is the point,” Kory Langhofer, one of the board’s lawyers, said of Heap’s strategy.
Voting rights groups have watched the case with alarm. They were shocked when Heap’s lawyers suggested during a particularly strident moment in litigation last month that the court appoint Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, as a mediator.
They also worry that Heap’s efforts will make casting a ballot more difficult. While he has not been a vocal proponent of election conspiracy theories, Heap has pursued policies favored by the state’s right-wing activists.
His changes to the signature verification system, which had been a target in Lake’s attempt to overturn her loss in 2022, caused the rates of rejected ballots to nearly triple during a county election last year. Heap has also curtailed the use of bipartisan delegations sent to hospitals, nursing homes and other areas to help voters fill out a ballot.
Kate Brophy McGee, a Republican who chairs the board of supervisors, said she worries that Heap has already done significant damage.
“Recorder Heap, with his serial lies, has done more to harm voter confidence in our elections than I could do in two lifetimes,” she said.
But Heap has sought to redirect the blame, telling a local TV station on June 24 that “any issues voters experience in this primary election fall squarely on the board’s shoulders.”
That same day, ballots were mailed to residents and early voting began.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.