Two grassroots organizations in Arizona that investigate election corruption examined recent public records from the Maricopa County Recorder and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBOS) in an attempt to get to the bottom of a Shared Services Agreement (SSA) the previous recorder, Stephen Richer made with the MCBOS in October turning over control of much of his office to them.
The new recorder, conservative and election integrity champion Justin Heap, demanded control of his office back after assuming office this year, pointing out that the agreement with lame-duck supervisors was made at the last minute at the end of the year. However, one of the two remaining supervisors on the board, Thomas Galvin, who is the chair, refuses to relinquish control.
Merissa Hamilton, co-founder of the grassroots group EZAZ, asked the other four supervisors on X to challenge Galvin, “@KateMcGeeAZ @DebbieLesko @MarkStewart_AZ @Steve_Gallardo to take back control of the Board and direct the County Manager to stop the chaos in election administration!”
She explained in her post, noting that Heap said he canceled the SSA, refusing to operate under it, “It can be argued that @thomasgalvin is actually causing chaos in election administration with the edicts from the now-terminated SSA with the @recordersoffice [Heap].”
She included a memo sent from Rey Valenzuela, a holdover from Richer’s administration who served as co-director of elections, to Heap in January. The memo brought out problems that arose since the SSA was implemented. Valenzuela argued that despite the split in duties between the two agencies, employees should not be restricted from critical areas of election processing based on who they report to. In other words, if Valenzuela has his way, employees of the county supervisors will have even more access to election operations.
In another post last week, Hamilton highlighted the feud between Heap and the MCBOS.
“It’s ironic that the County Manager [Jen Pokorski] wants to paint a picture that her leadership is high-performing when her staff locked out @recordersoffice [Heap] from MCTEC space where many of their employees work, took several weeks to even provide the Recorder and his new staff email addresses, and delayed onboarding for almost a month until just before their benefit window would expire,” Hamilton said. “She highlights that last item as a ‘success’ in her email.”
Hamilton posted more criticism that day of Pokorski, who reports to MCBOS. She said, “@recordersoffice Chief Deputy Recorder Jeff Mason sends an email to County Manager Jen Pokorski expressing … [his] concerns with the delays from her and the lack of accountability and response time from BOS staff in the duty they’ve been holding hostage to provide administrative support to the @recordersoffice. He says, ‘A 9-day delay on urgent matters from an Elected Official is not an acceptable time frame.’”
Hamilton included a screenshot of the email, saying, “If this current level of ‘dialogue’ and communication channels by Chairman Galvin and Recorder Heap are not improved, the consequences in the decline of administrative functionality is inevitable.”
She addressed a press release from Galvin which claimed he hadn’t ducked Heap’s efforts to discuss redoing the SSA. Hamilton said on X that his claim should “probably be rated with 4 pinocchios” and included a timeline of Heap’s attempted contacts provided by the recorder’s PIO Sam Stone.
“The document shows the @recordersoffice [Heap] was trying to schedule a meeting with Chairman @thomasgalvin from his first day in office on Jan. 23rd and being refused by @thomasgalvin,” Hamilton said. “Finally a meeting between the COS’ happens on Jan. 15th but only to ‘express concerns.’ No substantive conversation occurred.”
She included the timeline of attempted contacts. Between January 3 and February 7, there were 10 — plus more with the MCBOS’s attorney — some which resulted in activity, but not actually resulting in a redo of the SSA. The messages began with asking Galvin for a meeting. On February 3, Galvin’s chief of staff said he would call on February 4 but never did.
Instead, Galvin scheduled a meeting of the MCBOS to discuss the contract, without inviting Heap. Heap asked to participate and his request was ignored. Assistant County Manager Zach Schira said on February 13 that Galvin and the Vice Chairman would be reaching out to schedule a meeting. However, Hamilton said “[the] PRR records do not reflect any communication from the Chairman @thomasgalvin or Vice Chairman @katemcgeeaz or their staff.”
Two weeks after the meeting he was excluded from, Heap issued a statement denouncing the power grab and threatening legal action. Galvin responded for the MCBOS and said there were “factual errors” in his statement. Hamilton noted, “At this point it must be emphasized that at the time @thomasgalvin stated there were conversations ‘happening for weeks’ between the two offices on the SSA, there are only public records showing his staff delaying and canceling meetings on the SSA.”
The grassroots group We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA) recently started a podcast. On February 27, co-founder Shelby Busch, Bryan Blehm, a former election attorney for Kari Lake, and Chris Handsel, who has over 20 years computer experience with databases, discussed the changes made with the last minute SSA.
Busch described the feud between the two county agencies as a “cold war.” Blehm went over the differences between the previous agreement versus the new one signed in the fall. He referred to the new SSA as the “rehabilitate Stephen Richer reputation agreement.” Richer was ousted from office in last year’s Republican primary due to his hostility to election integrity.
Blehm emphasized that the SSA is very important since Maricopa County contains 60 percent of the state’s population and over 80 percent vote by mail. Busch said the supervisors are acting as if there isn’t a problem with the power grab.
They went over some of the history of the SSAs splitting up duties. In 2019, the MCBOS executed an agreement with then-recorder Adrian Fontes, taking away his control over Election Day voting and emergency voting. This was done due to the Democrat’s incompetence in handling the 2018 election. Some responsibilities became shared.
The 2024 SSA eliminated co-directors, leaving Scott Jarrett as the only Elections Director and moving the previous co-director Rey Valenzuela to another spot. Jarrett came under heavy criticism after the botched 2022 election for conflicting statements on the witness stand during Lake’s lawsuit over the voting machine tabulator problem involving incorrectly printed ballots that disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Republican voters, according to Heap.
Blehm expressed his concern about leaving Jarrett in charge.
“So our elections, the totality, the brunt of the elections in Maricopa County have now been placed in the hands, thanks to the board of supervisors and their infinite wisdom, in the hands of a man who has been unable to identify what is more likely than not malware that it had placed on their printers to do exactly what they did, and he still has absolutely no idea,” he said.
Handsel added, “Apparently, hasn’t got the right people working on it, doesn’t have the right talent, or doesn’t know how to identify the talent, and printers printing out the wrong size ballots that are untabulable, and literally, if you print out ballots that are the wrong size, it’s not like they can just take them down to the main tabulators at MCTEC and have them tabulated there if they don’t work in the field; they don’t work there to be, they have to be duplicated. And this is a big problem to have not solved, and all that time, and that doesn’t look good for Scott Jarrett.”
Busch expressed concern that the IT department was completely taken away from Heap in the SSA, leaving him the only county officer without his own IT department. She asked, “If they pull all of that responsibility out from underneath the recorder, does that then prohibit the recorder from actually knowing what’s going on in our elections?”
Blehm responded yes and deferred to Handsel for further elaboration due to his background in tech administering databases. Handsel said, “If they take away influence and control and authority over that area, that in the hands of a bureaucrat, then you’ve done exactly the opposite of what the people ask you to do when they elected, when they kicked out the old recorder and put in a new one.”
Blehm said, “I remember Steven Richer delivering the ballots to the call center in 2021. You were there, correct? And I remember his smug a** just treating everybody else like they were — everybody you know that was there for the audit, they were just mindless zombies.” Blehm warned that the MCBOS set up the SSA to create more election problems in 2026, which they will then blame on Heap.
Busch brought up another concern with the SSA.
“This whole voting security paragraph has been removed from the agreement without delineating who is responsible for the security of the information and networks,” she said. Handsel further expounded, “In order to administer voting registration database, he needs an IT staff. But they took the staff away from him,” she said.
Busch said her group has filed 40 public records requests that have not been filled. “They’re just getting filed away and not addressed,” she said. Handsel added that MCBOS is “ignoring requests outright” or denying many of them without giving a reason why.
Blehm noted about Galvin, “The Chairman has referred to people like us, as you know, ‘radical kooks.’”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to rachel.r.alexander@gmail.com.
Photo “Stephen Richer” by Stephen Richer. Background Photo “Voting Booths” by Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0.
The post Public Records Reveal Extent of Previous Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s Collusion with County Supervisors on Elections Power Grab first appeared on The Arizona Sun Times.