This is the other half of the September 30 exchange. Vice Chair Debbie Lesko wanted the room to hear why the equipment is split. For years, she said, the Recorder’s Office and the Elections Department shared machines and the work seemed to go fairly well. Then Recorder Justin Heap sued. The settlement followed. Early in-person voting stays with the Recorder. Election Day voting stays with the Board. The county agreed to fund a separate IT system for his office, reported at $15 million. Lesko said she is glad the case settled and that she wants the two offices to work together.
Heap’s answer was that the suit did not come out of the blue, and that sharing the county’s existing equipment was his request from the start. He said the Board’s IT side demanded a divide, both sides signed it, and he will execute it. The warning was the same one he gave the Chair: 46 sites, overnight trucks, a few hours on emergency-voting morning, and a burden that now sits on the Board’s staff, not his.
Lesko asked whether other Arizona counties keep early-voting equipment separate from Election Day equipment. Heap said most small counties do early voting only at the recorder’s office. Pinal is the comparison that matters. There the recorder and the elections director are the same person — Dana Lewis — so the equipment lives under one office, and Election Day is still precinct-based. Maricopa, he said, is a larger animal.
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Then Lesko said she wished they could share the equipment again, and that things had changed even before she was installed into office. She corrected herself: sworn into office. Before that oath, she said, Heap called threatening to sue the Board. Then he did.
Hear the correction. Hear the word she reached for first. No interpretation is required for the operational fact underneath it: a county this size is about to swap machines at 46 sites in one night because a lawsuit ended in two piles of equipment.
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:17
Offices are sworn, not installed. Equipment can be shared or divided. The morning still has to open on time. Ask the Board which plan the people at those 46 sites are actually executing.
The oath is spoken in public. So was this.
