County Recorder Response to MCBOS Letter Regarding Early In-Person Voting
February 26, 2026
To: Chair Kate Brophy McGee
Vice Chair Debbie Lesko
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors
301 W. Jefferson St.,10th floor
Phoenix, Az 85003
Re: Collaboration on Early Voting and Statutory Compliance
Chair Brophy McGee and Vice Chair Lesko,
I am writing in response to your February 24th letter and your accompanying public statement regarding early in-person voting. I appreciate the importance of ensuring that Maricopa County voters continue to have meaningful access to early voting opportunities. My office remains fully committed to providing secure, accessible, and lawful elections for every voter in our county.
I have serious concerns that the proposed early voting plan you provided makes voting inconvenient and inaccessible for a large number of Maricopa County voters, threatening the ability of working families, those with childcare responsibilities, those with physical impairments, the elderly, and others to participate in our elections. Therefore, to protect the voters who elected me and pursuant to my authority under A.R.S. § 16-542, which expressly authorizes the Recorder to establish early voting locations, I must reject the current early voting site plan.
The attached county map showing the Board’s proposed early voting locations demonstrates a highly uneven distribution. Some areas, such as Tempe, and parts of the West Valley, have a plethora of locations, while major communities such as Glendale, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Queen Creek have very few. For example, Tempe, with a population of about 180,000, has three designated Early-voting sites. In comparison, Mesa, with a population of approximately 500,000, has only one site. Thus, per capita, Tempe has one site for every 60,000 inhabitants, while Mesa has one site for every 500,000 inhabitants. Even worse, that planned Mesa site is in the extreme southeast corner of the city. It thus appears that most Mesa residents will have to travel more than 10 miles to reach an early voting location. There is no conceivable justification for such a huge disparity in how residents of Tempe and Mesa will be treated under Mr. Jarrett’s current plan. Many other similar disparities exist.
That kind of imbalance makes voting more difficult in large portions of the county and risks leaving a substantial percentage of county voters without reasonable access to early voting. Elections should be fair and accessible for everyone, regardless of where they live. I cannot support a plan that does not provide all voters a reasonably equal opportunity to vote.
The Board has also repeatedly frustrated my ability to secure an adequate number of conveniently located polling places for early voting. For the past year, the Board repeatedly claimed, both publicly and in court, that it alone controls in-person early voting. Just last week, the Board reversed that position and acknowledged that Arizona law places early voting under the Recorder. But while your public messaging has changed, the reality on the ground has not.
As of today, no staff, funding, equipment, or planning authority has been transferred to the Recorder’s Office for the execution of this statutory duty.
At the same time, the Board’s Elections Director, Scott Jarrett, has been developing an early voting plan for months without involving my office. On Monday, we were given only a broad outline of his plan and asked to approve it within days. That is not collaboration. If there was a genuine intent to transition early voting back to the Recorder as listed in statute, that work should have started months ago, not weeks before voting operations begin.
I remain willing to work in good faith. But cooperation does not mean rubber-stamping a plan my office had no role in building, and which fails to adequately protect the voters. Especially a plan that keeps full operational control with the Board while placing public accountability with the Recorder.
Your public statement suggests that if I do not accept this proposal by tomorrow, the Recorder will be expected to run early voting alone and the Board will not provide me with the necessary resources to administer early voting. That framing is misleading. As each of you most assuredly know, the Recorder cannot run a countywide early voting program without the funding, contracts, staffing, and equipment that remain solely under Board control. And A.R.S. § 11-601(2) requires the Board to fund the “necessary expenses incurred in the conduct of [the Recorder’s] office[].” Arizona law does not give the Board the power to encroach on the duties and authorities of other elected officers. The Board cannot condition its funding of my duties on my acceptance of Mr. Jarrett’s de facto authority over early voting. The people of Maricopa County elected me to run early voting, not Mr. Jarrett.
I have been asking the Board for more than a year to cooperate with me on making an orderly transition of control over early voting back to the Recorder’s Office, as required by statute. Any urgent time pressures that now exist are entirely the Board’s own doing. The solution, therefore, must also come from the Board: it must expeditiously provide my office with the needed resources for me to do the job that the people elected me to do.
My office remains ready to lead in crafting an early voting plan in honest collaboration with the Board, based on mutually agreed-upon timelines, and with a commitment from the Board to match the resources to the responsibility bestowed upon my office.
Maricopa County voters made clear they seek us to have collaboration based on the statutory division of duties, rather than artificial deadlines or public narratives that obscure the facts and cause voter confusion.
Sincerely,
Justin Heap
Maricopa County Recorder