Ballot Math / Maricopa County races

Candidate races: Maricopa County

The two county races actually on your 2026 ballot

November 3, 2026 general election. Most Maricopa County offices (supervisors, county attorney, sheriff, recorder, assessor) were elected in 2024 and are not on this ballot. Two countywide races are: an open Clerk of the Superior Court seat that has changed hands twice in eighteen months, and an at-large community college board seat that has become a fight over football.

Clerk of the Superior Court

What this office does: the Clerk is the record keeper and financial officer of Maricopa County Superior Court: every filing, exhibit, and docket, plus fees, fines, and restitution, marriage licenses, and passport applications. Roughly 650 to 670 staff, a budget over $60 million, serving about 4.5 million people. The job pays $96,600 a year. It is an administrative office that most voters have never thought about, right up until a court record they need is lost, late, or hard to get.

Why the seat is open, twice over: Jeff Fine, elected in 2018 and reelected in 2022, stepped down April 2, 2025 for a statewide role with the Arizona Supreme Court's administrative office. Gov. Hobbs appointed Judge Joseph W. Malka, a judicial officer with 27 years of experience, to serve until this election. Malka then stepped down himself on March 29, 2026, for reasons not reported in the sources we found. Chief Deputy Nancy Rodriguez currently holds the office. Neither candidate below is an incumbent; both won their primaries unopposed.

Sebastian "Seb" Matta (Democrat)

Age 19. A sophomore at Arizona State University studying philosophy; a high school debater who began gathering signatures at 18. A Democratic voting guide describes him as reported to be the youngest person ever to secure a partisan nomination in Arizona history. His father investigates for a law firm, and Matta says he visited the Clerk's office often as a child. He has held no prior public office.

  • Why he is running, in his account: Democrats fielded no candidate for this office in 2022, which he says is what inspired the run.
  • Stated priorities (his campaign site, as reported by the ASU State Press): language accessibility (more translated self-help guides, more interpreters), plain-language public materials, public awareness of what the Clerk's office does, modernization, and expanding online filing for probate cases. He says the office recently translated its website into multiple languages partly following his campaign's push.
  • His campaign's own claims: he has driven over 20,000 miles campaigning since January and raised money from hundreds of individual donors across more than nine states. No dollar totals for his campaign were found in any source we searched.
  • The qualifications fight, with his response: Dial has publicly questioned his teenage opponent's qualifications after Matta filed two campaign finance reports late. Matta blamed a busy campaign schedule and said, "I'm not a math wiz." On the age question generally, he invites skeptics to judge his dedication; if elected, he plans to take a semester off, then finish his philosophy degree online.

Jeff Dial (Republican)

Former state legislator from LD18 (Ahwatukee, Chandler, Tempe): Arizona House 2011 to 2015, Arizona Senate 2015 to 2017. Realtor and businessman; per his campaign bio, he helped run a multigeneration family company, later started a small business with his wife, and has served on several Arizona boards. ASU graduate; U.S. Army Reserve veteran. He lost his 2016 Senate primary to Frank Schmuck, 53.4 percent, and Schmuck then lost the general election to a Democrat.

  • Legislative record (as he presents it, and the documented parts): committee work in education, public safety, commerce, and technology, and chairmanship of a debt and budget reform committee per his bio; two sponsorships he claims are the bill making Arizona one of the first states to allow proof of insurance on a phone, and the 2013 law creating the Extraordinary Educators license plate that funds classroom projects. One frequently asked item we could not verify: his individual vote on the 2013 Medicaid expansion. It is not printed here because we could not confirm it from a roll call source.
  • Stated priorities (his campaign site): slogan "Integrity. Honesty. Professionalism," tagline "Let's keep the Clerk's office boring." He says the Clerk should "uphold the law and follow the Constitution, not a personal agenda," expand online filing and online access to court records so people do not need a lawyer or a day off work, run the $60 million budget with business-style stewardship, strengthen staff retention, and cooperate with the Court while keeping the separately elected Clerk independent of judges.
  • Money: no totals for his campaign were found in any source we searched, the same as his opponent.
  • An older contested item: the Arizona Republic reported in 2015 that Dial's eight-year Army Reserve commitment, begun in 1996, ended in an honorable discharge in 2004 that he attributed to his weight. It was a contested point in his campaigns at the time. We print it as it was reported then, with its age and contested status visible, because voters researching his record will encounter it.

Community College Board, At-Large

What this office does: the Maricopa County Community College District is one of the largest community college systems in the nation, 10 colleges and more than 140,000 students a year, educating more Arizona residents than any university in the state. Its seven-member board (five district seats, two at large) sets tuition, currently $97 per credit hour and unchanged since fiscal 2024, adopts the budget (about $884 million for fiscal 2026-27), and sets district policy. Local property taxes supply roughly three times the revenue of tuition and fees, which is why this unpaid, nonpartisan board is worth a page. Vote for one.

Judy Schwiebert

Born 1951 or 1952, per her published biography. A Democrat running in a nonpartisan race. Twenty-seven years teaching English in the Glendale Union and Peoria districts; co-founded Theater Works, a nonprofit theater and education organization, in 1986; raised two sons as a single mother in northwest Phoenix. Arizona House of Representatives 2021 to 2025 (LD20, then LD2 after redistricting). She ran for the state Senate in 2024 and lost to incumbent Sen. Shawnna Bolick. Community college ties she campaigns on: her mother graduated from Phoenix College, her father worked in career and technical education, and she attended four of the district's colleges herself.

  • Stated priorities: keep the colleges affordable and accessible; build the workforce pipeline (fast-track certifications, the trades, and the system's new bachelor's degrees); support professional faculty; build employer partnerships linking education to high-wage jobs.
  • Endorsements: the Maricopa County Community College Faculty PAC (the faculty association's political arm), the Arizona Building and Construction Trades Council, and a student coalition, plus sitting board members including the board's current president, Linda Thor, per her endorsements page. She campaigns jointly with the faculty-endorsed candidates in the district races.
  • Money: no filed totals found. Her own fundraising emails describe a "shoestring budget" and a need for about $1,500 more for palm cards through Election Day. (A much larger figure, about $585,000, circulates for her name; it is from her 2020 legislative campaign, a different race, and does not belong in this one.)

John Crow

Of Glendale. Real estate agent (Century 21 Northwest) and a partner at Striventa Business Solutions, a consulting firm. No prior public service found. He runs on a three-candidate slate called Change4Maricopa with Susan Winder (District 3) and Ryan Caracciolo (District 4); Crow and Caracciolo are also business partners, per Arizona Corporation Commission records summarized by an opposing site. The slate is on Turning Point PAC's 2026 "Freedom Ticket" and in the county GOP's voter guides.

  • The slate's signature issue: restore community college football, which MCCCD eliminated in February 2018 citing budget. The slate's plan documents, as captured and quoted by an opposing site (the slate's own page blocked direct access during our research), propose a new student fee of $2 per credit hour, indexed to inflation, with up to 60 percent directed to football after launch, and list a $1 million per year property tax increase dedicated to the fund as one way to lower the fee. Crow, on a FOX 10 program in September, estimated the program's cost: "Let's say it's a million and a half," arguing athletes' tuition brings in about $1.1 million and "you cut enrollment, you cut revenue when you cut the program."
  • Criticisms, attributed: the site Protect Community Colleges, which opposes the slate, notes that Crow's cost figure omits one-time capital costs, and that the district's own 2018 estimate, cited on the slate's website, said the programs could eventually need more than $20 million in capital improvements. The same site reports FEC records showing Crow contributed $500 in March 2024 to the Kari Lake Victory Fund, and that the slate's campaign video misspelled both of his running mates' names. These items come from an opposition source and are labeled as such; the football cost dispute, though, rests on the district's published 2018 numbers, which any voter can check.
  • A precision note, because it matters: Schwiebert's campaign says the opposing slate has "publicly said they don't think community colleges should receive any taxpayer money." The documented statement of that kind is Winder's, from a 2024 questionnaire, not Crow's. No direct statement by Crow opposing taxpayer funding was found. This page does not attribute another candidate's words to him.
  • Money: no campaign finance totals found for Crow either.

Verification notes

  • No campaign finance dollar totals exist in the sources for any of the four candidates on this page as of October 26, 2026. Both races are covered mostly by the campaigns themselves, student and advocacy press, and one opposition site, all labeled in place. No azcentral feature on the Clerk's race was found.
  • Judge Malka's reason for leaving the Clerk's office in March 2026 was not reported in the sources we searched. This page states the fact of the departure and does not speculate.
  • One biographical detail about Schwiebert is listed inconsistently across sources (the institution for her master's degree, named as the University of Ottawa in one and Ottawa University in others). The degree itself is not in dispute; the school is omitted here rather than guessed.
  • Dial's birth date circulates on a low-quality celebrity-birthday site. It is omitted.

How to vote without getting your ballot rejected

  • Mail it by Tuesday, October 27, 2026. After that day, do not mail it: use a drop box or a vote center.
  • It must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 2026. Postmarks do not count.
  • Sign and date the affidavit envelope, and write a current phone number on it. If your signature is questioned, the county will try to reach you.
  • Leaving any item blank is allowed and does not affect the rest of your ballot.

Sources

Ballot Math: analysis only, no endorsements. Every candidate got the same template: background, record, stated priorities, and controversies with responses, with thin coverage admitted where it is thin. Back to Ballot Math home.