IN FOCUS - Nov. 21, 2025

It’s not every election that a sitting U.S. Senator needs to call in to cure his own ballot. 

Yet, this is where Maricopa County finds itself following the first election canvass under Recorder Justin Heap. 

As part of this week’s certification of the Nov. 4 election, it was revealed that nearly 6,000 mail-in ballots out of approximately 700,000 cast had been rejected by the Recorder’s Office due to signature concerns. Republican and independent voters were impacted the most. The rate of rejection - .8% - is over 2 ½ times higher than during both the 2024 general election and the county’s last off-year election, in 2023. 

The rate of rejected ballots has now become the latest flash point in the feud between Recorder Heap and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. The Board asked for an explanation for all of the tossed ballots, which Recorder Heap attributed to a “more diligent” signature-review process. Chairman Thomas Galvin noted that, had a similar rejection rate been applied to the 2024 general election, that would have equated to more than 15,000 ballots - enough to swing multiple elections.  

Now, the questions everyone wants answered are: who were these voters whose ballots were rejected? Were they fraudsters nabbed by an improved signature-verification process? Or legitimate voters disenfranchised by government run amok?

A lot is riding on the answers to those questions, especially with the higher-stakes elections of 2026 up next.