Voters in Arizona’s largest county are on track to elect a staunch conservative to replace the locality’s leftist-friendly elections chief.
On Wednesday, Democrat Tim Stringham announced that he had called Republican Justin Heap to effectively concede defeat in the race to become Maricopa County’s next recorder. Heap, a member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, confirmed his opponent called to concede in a tweet published the same day.
“It is undeniably true that past elections, under both parties and spanning more than a decade, have denigrated our county’s reputation and made us the laughing stock of the nation. That ends today,” Heap wrote on X.
While Arizona officials continue to count votes as of this article’s publication, preliminary results show Heap currently leading Stringham by 3.6 points, according to The New York Times.
The apparent victory is welcome news for Arizona voters concerned about the integrity of Maricopa County elections. Since 2021, the recorder position has been occupied by Stephen Richer, a self-styled “Republican” who is hostile to election integrity activists throughout the state.
Heap previously defeated Richer during Arizona’s July primaries, in which the latter reportedly received financial backing from Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman. The race came months after legacy media launched a seemingly coordinated campaign to baselessly smear Heap as an “election denier” and boost Richer’s reelection prospects.
Despite campaigning as a supporter of election integrity efforts in his 2020 campaign, Richer did a complete 180 upon entering office.
As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway previously noted, the GOP recorder has defended his Democrat predecessor’s administration of Maricopa’s 2020 election, penned “op-eds at CNN against the type of election audits he conducted to gain power,” and attacked “Republican leaders and voters for their election integrity concerns.” He also allegedly lobbied against a commonsense voter ID ballot amendment and jumpstarted a political action committee to back candidates who share his antagonism toward election integrity efforts.
Richer notably helped preside over Maricopa County’s disastrous 2022 midterm elections. When voters expressed concerns about potential disenfranchisement resulting from the county’s misadministration, he dismissed such worries as “conspiracy theories.”
Equally alarming, however, is the GOP recorder’s willingness to censor those he disagrees with. As my colleague Logan Washburn recently reported, emails obtained by The Federalist show how Richer “turned to the left-leaning States United Democracy Center and an overseas group bankrolled by the State Department to help his office target election speech that’s disapproved of by the government.”
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