‘This is chaos’: Maricopa County election-denier official accused of seizing election equipment, ballots

Local officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County have accused county recorder Justin Heap’s office of improperly seizing election equipment and documents as votes were being counted in local elections earlier this year.

In taking the equipment and files, Heap’s office set off “grave chain-of-custody concerns” and forced the county to purchase new equipment, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors said in a press release Monday.

The alarming allegation marked the latest case of officials with a history of election denialism seizing election materials under suspect pretenses, echoing a similar instance in Riverside County, California, and the federal government’s seizure of 2020 election records from Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year.

Maricopa County — the most populous county in Arizona and one of the largest election jurisdictions in the U.S. — has been a primary target of President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Heap, a Republican and a known election denier who has falsely claimed that the county’s results in that race were rigged against Trump, acknowledged his staff took the equipment in March, but claimed it was owned by his office.

The accusation came amid a growing legal feud between Heap’s office and the Republican-controlled board over election administration duties in the county.

In the course of the dispute, Heap has threatened county officials and election workers with criminal charges if they exercise powers he claims are his. The board, in turn, has accused Heap of deliberately sabotaging election operations and sowing confusion.

The court battle has ignited uncertainty about how upcoming primaries and the November midterm elections will go in the county, which is a key swing jurisdiction in the politically divided state.

In the county’s press release, Board Chair Kate Brophy McGee, a Republican, and Board Vice Chair Debbie Lesko, another Republican, said security cameras in March recorded staff from Heap’s office removing a scanner from a secure election site without permission.

Besides the scanner, which the board said it controlled, Heap’s office also took provisional ballot envelopes, some of which may have contained live ballots for municipal elections in Tempe, Arizona, the board said.

Brophy McGee and Lesko added that Heap’s employees loaded the scanner and ballots into a personal vehicle and kept them without permission for about 50 minutes. They returned the scanner after Scott Jarrett, the county’s elections director, notified Heap’s office about the incident.

“It is unknown what transpired with the scanner during this period, other than that it was taken to [the recorder’s] executive offices,” the board members said. They added that all envelopes and ballots were accounted for after a review.

However, because of concerns that the scanner could have been compromised, they said the board was forced to buy a replacement for around $70,000.

“This isn’t conservative. This is chaos,” Lesko said on social media.

In a social media post, Heap asserted that the equipment — he said the incident involved two different scanners — was purchased by his office in 2023 and was never “lawfully transferred” to the county’s elections department, meaning his office still controlled it. 

In a court filing Monday, Heap added that his employees were attempting to use the scanners to process early ballots for the state’s upcoming primary elections.

However, he did not explain why his staff members took the ballot envelopes along with the scanners.

After an internal review of the removals, the board said it alerted the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. The office then appointed a special prosecutor to determine whether Heap’s staff broke state law.

While the board said it normally would not comment on an ongoing probe, it said it had to respond publicly Monday because of Heap’s court filing, which asked a judge to halt the criminal investigation because it amounted to “retaliatory conduct” against his office.

Heap’s court filing was entered on his behalf by a lawyer from America First Legal (AFL), a law firm founded by Trump advisor Stephen Miller that has for years targeted Arizona’s election practices based on conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential contest.

In an alarming letter last month, an AFL lawyer accused Arizona election officials of committing “serious felonies” by approving early voting centers and ballot drop boxes for the upcoming primary election. The lawyer also threatened board officials and poll workers with potential criminal prosecutions.

In its own court filing Monday, the board accused AFL of effectively using its representation of Heap as a “launching pad for an unprecedented power grab” in the county.

“Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap has lost control of his office,” Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the Maricopa County Board, said on social media Monday. “Once again, the chaos and dysfunction surrounding the Recorder’s Office demonstrate that Heap is unfit to serve in this position.”

Amid his battle with the board, Heap has supported the Trump administration’s aggressive election-related actions against the state.

After the FBI successfully served a subpoena against the Arizona State Senate seeking records from the 2020 election, Heap said he would be “happy to comply” with any request to turn over voter data.