former gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake<\/a>.<\/p>\nNow, Heap won\u2019t say whether he thinks the jump in rejected ballots is an indication that ballots with bad signatures were counted under Richer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really am not qualified to answer that,\u201d Heap said. \u201cI wasn’t involved or saw those processes. All I can say is we have greater levels of checks and more bipartisan input.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s historic signature on one screen alongside their current ballot envelope.<\/p>\n
The old system required reviewers to scroll down to see the available signatures for comparison.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d Heap said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now, he has a bipartisan team \u2013 which can include Republicans, Democrats or unaffiliated volunteers \u2013 to review signatures.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d Heap said.<\/p>\n
After that, the system is largely the same.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“I’m glad I caught the notification, but many people are too busy and avoid spam calls and texts,” Gallego added.<\/p>\n
A Maricopa County judge rejected Recorder Justin Heap\u2019s request to immediately block the Board of Supervisors from overseeing a third-party audit of the county\u2019s voting systems.<\/p>\n
It depends on who you ask<\/p>\n
The Recorder\u2019s Office claimed the new system is not responsible for a jump in rejected ballots.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s elections were conducted all by mail, whether a voter requested a mail-in ballot or not. That\u2019s a common practice in off-year elections that consist mostly of local government and school-district elections but feature no major races.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of them may have only one signature on file because they don’t participate actively through the mail ballot,\u201d Valenzuela said.<\/p>\n
Heap added that in \u201ca regular election, this will probably be back to the median.\u201d<\/p>\n
But during the last off-year elections in 2023, the Recorder\u2019s Office under Richer rejected 1,425 of the 472,508 ballots cast, a 0.3% rejection rate, well below the rate seen this year.<\/p>\n
Richer, the former recorder, said there isn\u2019t a logical reason why the number of rejected ballots would jump so significantly another off year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s laughable to think 5,000+ people stole ballot envelopes and forged signatures so they could cast one more vote in a school bond election,\u201d Richer said.<\/p>\n
And during a contentious exchange, Galvin suggested Heap was looking for a reason to reject ballots, which Heap denied.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d Heap said.<\/p>\n
Galvin replied, \u201cIf 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
Faster results<\/p>\n
![\"Stephen](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763743540_718_\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Arizona Media Association + Local News Foundation<\/p>\n
Stephen Richer<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 which are unofficial \u2013 and the official canvass of an election approved the Board weeks after an election<\/a>.<\/p>\nHeap claimed that, under his new system, the Recorder\u2019s Office was able to clear ballots faster than Richer\u2019s office did in the 2024 primary election, which featured a similar number of early ballots dropped off on election day.<\/p>\n
Richer rejected Heap\u2019s claim.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t speed up the process,\u201d Richer said. \u201cThey even called in Board-side people to help. And we always had signature verification done the next day after jurisdictional elections.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not all bad<\/p>\n
The tough questioning about Heap\u2019s new process comes as the board and recorder are engaged in a fight over who controls different aspects of the county\u2019s election system.<\/p>\n
But several supervisors said they did appreciate the changes he made.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’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,\u201d Supervisor Debbie Lesko said.<\/p>\n
The decision to use a bipartisan panel to review signatures was praised by Republicans Lesko, Kate Brophy-McGee, Mark Stewart and Democrat Steve Gallardo.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause I just don\u2019t think you fill out a ballot and vote with the idea that your vote is going to get counted and you don\u2019t stop to think about the match,\u201d Brophy-McGee said.<\/p>\n
Heap, after initially blaming the type of election for the jump in rejections, said it may be voters who are at fault.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd 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\u2019t match.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During his first countywide election, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap\u2019s office rejected ballots at a rate nearly three…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":395029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5131],"tags":[5229,5643,1587,1589,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-395028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-phoenix","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-arizona","10":"tag-az","11":"tag-phoenix","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115588702785879026","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}