During his first countywide election, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap’s office rejected ballots at a rate nearly three times as high as seen in recent elections, causing alarm for some county leaders.
According to county elections information, 5,903 of the 704,548 ballots cast in the Nov. 4 elections were not counted due to “bad signatures” on early ballots.
That amounts to a rejection rate of approximately 0.8%, nearly triple the 0.3% rate in the 2024 general election, when more than 2 million ballots were cast in Maricopa County. The county had a similar 0.3% rejection rate in 2023 and a rate of just 0.1% in 2022.
The rate jumped as Heap implemented a new system to verify signatures on mail-in ballots.
“I think, quite frankly, it’s a home run for my staff that did amazing work to put all this together, and we intend to continue going forward,” Heap told the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Nov. 19, ahead of a vote to certify the election.
But some officials, including Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas Galvin, worry the jump in rejection rate means valid ballots are being rejected under the new system.
“At today’s Canvas, I expressed my deep concern that too many valid ballots were rejected by Justin Heap’s office because of the new signature verification policy,” Galvin wrote on social media.
A new system
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An elections worker runs ballots through vote-counting machines at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on Nov. 10, 2022.
Heap, a former state lawmaker, won election to the in 2024 by promising to improve processes at the Recorder’s Office, claiming incumbent Republican Recorder Stephen Richer’s office was failing to adequately verify signatures.
“They say, ‘I don’t trust it,’ because they see glaring problems and failures systemic [sic] up and down the line, and these problems seem not to get fixed for multiple cycles,” Heap said at a debate weeks before defeating Richer in the 2024 Republican primary.
Heap was also backed by a number of high-profile figures in the election-denial movement who made debunked claims that the county violated signature verification laws in past elections, including President Donald Trump and former gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake.
Now, Heap won’t say whether he thinks the jump in rejected ballots is an indication that ballots with bad signatures were counted under Richer.
“I really am not qualified to answer that,” Heap said. “I wasn’t involved or saw those processes. All I can say is we have greater levels of checks and more bipartisan input.”
Heap told the supervisors he made two major changes to the process after taking office, including adopting new technology that allows election workers reviewing signatures to see a voter’s historic signature on one screen alongside their current ballot envelope.
The old system required reviewers to scroll down to see the available signatures for comparison.
“We hope they would scroll up and down and do it, but the reality is, even though this might not seem like a huge amount of effort, if you’ve got 800 of these to get through, then you’re probably not going to scroll down as much,” Heap said.
The other change involved who actually reviews the signatures and can go through up to three levels of review before they are sent out for curing, or direct contact made with voters in an attempt to verify their ballot.
Under the old system, the first review involved a single person reviewing a signature and then reviewing their own work a second time, Heap said.
Now, he has a bipartisan team – which can include Republicans, Democrats or unaffiliated volunteers – to review signatures.
“We make sure now that both parties can feel equally assured that someone of their party is reviewing to reduce any concern by the voters that there might be a partisan slant one way or another among our verifiers,” Heap said.
After that, the system is largely the same.
Signatures that are flagged after two rounds of review are then looked at by senior staff and, if questions remain, they go through the curing process. At that point, election workers mail, call and text voters in an attempt to reach them and verify their ballot.
U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego was among those caught up in Heap’s new verification system and said he was able to cure his ballot in time for it to be counted. On X, Gallego wrote that he’s “voted in every election by mail since 2006,” meaning the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has plenty of his signatures from over the years for comparison.
“I’m glad I caught the notification, but many people are too busy and avoid spam calls and texts,” Gallego added.
A Maricopa County judge rejected Recorder Justin Heap’s request to immediately block the Board of Supervisors from overseeing a third-party audit of the county’s voting systems.
It depends on who you ask
The Recorder’s Office claimed the new system is not responsible for a jump in rejected ballots.
Early Voting Director Rey Valenzuela, who has worked at the county for three decades, said the increase could be attributed to the fact this year’s elections were conducted all by mail, whether a voter requested a mail-in ballot or not. That’s a common practice in off-year elections that consist mostly of local government and school-district elections but feature no major races.
Valenzuela said that means many people who typically vote in person had to instead vote by mail or drop off their ballot at an election center.
“Many of them may have only one signature on file because they don’t participate actively through the mail ballot,” Valenzuela said.
Heap added that in “a regular election, this will probably be back to the median.”
But during the last off-year elections in 2023, the Recorder’s Office under Richer rejected 1,425 of the 472,508 ballots cast, a 0.3% rejection rate, well below the rate seen this year.
Richer, the former recorder, said there isn’t a logical reason why the number of rejected ballots would jump so significantly another off year.
“It’s laughable to think 5,000+ people stole ballot envelopes and forged signatures so they could cast one more vote in a school bond election,” Richer said.
And during a contentious exchange, Galvin suggested Heap was looking for a reason to reject ballots, which Heap denied.
“The purpose of my process is, and it’s always been that the reason that the fact that we have a large percentage of our voters who do not trust the system, that itself is an existential crisis that we need to address,” Heap said.
Galvin replied, “If you increase the number of bad signatures, if you increase the number of signatures being rejected, do you think that increases the trust in elections?”
Faster results
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Stephen Richer
Heap also won office claiming he would help speed up election results, as some conservative activists complained it takes Maricopa County too long to call tight races, an argument that often conflates calls made by news networks – which are unofficial – and the official canvass of an election approved the Board weeks after an election.
Heap claimed that, under his new system, the Recorder’s Office was able to clear ballots faster than Richer’s office did in the 2024 primary election, which featured a similar number of early ballots dropped off on election day.
Richer rejected Heap’s claim.
“He didn’t speed up the process,” Richer said. “They even called in Board-side people to help. And we always had signature verification done the next day after jurisdictional elections.”
Not all bad
The tough questioning about Heap’s new process comes as the board and recorder are engaged in a fight over who controls different aspects of the county’s election system.
But several supervisors said they did appreciate the changes he made.
“I’ll give you credit when credit’s due, and I think if you’ve done it faster and it’s still accurate and you’re able to make it easier for the people, it sounds like a good thing,” Supervisor Debbie Lesko said.
The decision to use a bipartisan panel to review signatures was praised by Republicans Lesko, Kate Brophy-McGee, Mark Stewart and Democrat Steve Gallardo.
But they still had concerns, and Brophy-McGee said she wanted the Recorder to come up with ways to better check ballot signatures, especially for voters with few signatures from decades ago in their voter file for comparison.
“Because I just don’t think you fill out a ballot and vote with the idea that your vote is going to get counted and you don’t stop to think about the match,” Brophy-McGee said.
Heap, after initially blaming the type of election for the jump in rejections, said it may be voters who are at fault.
“And if putting additional bipartisan checks on the system results in a 10% increase in rejected ballots, I think that speaks to the fact that we need to make sure that people are being more diligent on how they signature and need to reach out, but we’re not just going to approve signatures if they don’t match.”