Lisa Everett, a Dysart Unified School District Governing Board candidate who describes herself as a Republican activist, has recently drawn attention for criticizing conservative candidates, including Arizona Corporation Commission nominee Ralph Heap, and the conservative groups that supported his campaign.
Everett has filed two campaign-finance complaints against Heap, one with the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission and one with the Secretary of State’s Office while publicly defending his primary rivals, Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers. She has also repeatedly called on Heap to withdraw from the race, even after he advanced to the general election over Myers.
Everett’s public support for the two Republican incumbents Heap challenged predates the complaints. In her June 1 “Patriotnheels” newsletter, Everett published a section titled “Truth vs. Lies: The Record of Arizona Corporation Commissioners Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers.” The newsletter summarized Thompson and Myers’ defenses of their records on renewable-energy mandates, President Donald Trump’s energy agenda, utility rate mechanisms, and grid reliability.
Heap challenged Thompson and Myers for one of two Republican nominations to the Corporation Commission. In the July 21 primary, Thompson finished first with 35.8% of the vote, Heap finished second with 33%, and Myers finished third with 31.2%. Thompson and Heap advanced to the November general election.
After the primary, Everett escalated her public opposition to Heap. She announced her Secretary of State complaint, publicly thanked Clean Elections when commissioners denied Heap’s request to leave the public-financing program, and subsequently urged Republicans to call for Heap’s withdrawal. She has continued publishing updates about the campaign-finance proceedings through her Patriotnheels account.
Heap entered the Corporation Commission race with support from the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and Turning Point Action. Everett has previously criticized Turning Point’s influence in Arizona Republican primaries. In May, she told the Arizona Capitol Times that Turning Point “puts their money behind people, and that machine rolls, but it turns off the independent voters.”
Everett has also directly criticized the Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s involvement in Corporation Commission races. In a post to X on August 4 she wrote, “Some have asked me why I am pursuing this. – Accountability. Some are concerned a Democrat could get elected. My prayer is Heap removes himself from the ballot and the Party appoints a great candidate. If we lose this seat the blame lays at the feet of Arizona Free Enterprise Club and their partners. They ran candidates against two great incumbents simply because the incumbents could not be controlled. The blame also lies at the feet of Heap for violating campaign finance laws. This is truly a case of don’t blame the messenger.”
Some have asked me why I am pursuing this. – Accountability. Some are concerned a Democrat could get elected. My prayer is Heap removes himself from the ballot and the Party appoints a great candidate. If we lose this seat the blame lays at the feet of Arizona Free Enterprise… pic.twitter.com/VbzS6qRbhH
In an August 7 reply on X, she added, “Arizona Free Enterprise Club continues to recruit candidates that know nothing about utilities. They do this because they want a puppet at the ACC. Nick and Kevin follow statutes and understand the issues.”
Everett describes herself as a conservative Republican. Her Patriotnheels website identifies her as a longtime Republican organizer and describes the outlet as a West Valley platform that promotes conservative viewpoints and candidates. The same site also features an essay written by Everett titled, “The Republican Party Is Still A Big Tent — Let’s Start Acting Like It.” In that piece, she criticized Republican “purists” and “RINO” labeling and argued against isolating “McCain Republicans” and “moderate Republicans.” She also urged Republicans to engage with political opponents rather than limit their political activity to people who already agree with them.
Everett has applied that argument to disputes over Republican political figures as well. During an August 7 discussion on X over whether former Mesa Mayor John Giles (now the running mate for Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs) should be described as a leftist, Everett wrote, “The far right does not understand that concept. If you fail their purity test – you are a leftist.”
The far right does not understand that concept. If you fail their purity test – you are a leftist.
Everett drew attention for that approach in 2025 while serving as chair of the Legislative District 29 Republican Committee. In April of that year, Everett organized Republican counter-protests against Northwest Valley Indivisible demonstrations targeting President Donald Trump and Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ-08). Everett told AZ Free News at the time that she organized supporters after seeing the anti-Hamadeh demonstrations and said the Republican participants supported the Trump administration’s agenda.
Four months later, Everett joined Brent Peak, co-chair of Northwest Valley Indivisible, in advocating for Peoria-area restaurant owner Lai Kuen “Kelly” Yu after Yu was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. AZ Free News reported in August 2025 that Everett and Peak were working on Yu’s behalf even as Democratic Senators Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, along with Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ-04), also supported Yu. Everett told The Center Square that Yu came to the United States while pregnant, sought asylum, and became active in the Peoria community. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Yu had entered the country illegally in 2004 and had exhausted her legal avenues to remain. Court records cited by AZ Free News showed the Ninth Circuit denied Yu’s asylum appeal in 2016.
The Maricopa County Republican Committee subsequently censured Everett by a 23-6 vote over her advocacy for Yu and her work with Peak. It also called for her resignation from her district leadership position. Everett defended her actions and later wrote on X that the county party was increasingly controlled by people she considered extremists, describing them as “so far right they are turning left.”
MCRC Censures LD29 Chairwoman Lisa Everett
Last night, the Maricopa County Republican Committee voted to censure me, Lisa Everett, Chairwoman of LD29. With that vote, my name is now listed alongside an ever-growing roster of Republicans who have been censured by MCRC: County… pic.twitter.com/5hvdhA5iTZ
Everett is now campaigning for the Dysart Unified School District Governing Board, where her campaign lists protecting the district’s A rating, supporting teachers and staff, and maintaining facilities among her priorities.
Heap and Thompson will appear on the Nov. 3 Corporation Commission ballot alongside Democrats Clara Pratte and Jonathon Hill and Green Party candidate Mike Cease.
The Protect Education Act is projected to fall more than 10,000 valid signatures short of the number required to qualify for Arizona’s November ballot after a court challenge removed thousands of petition signatures and county recorders completed their validity reviews.
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) announced Monday that applying the trial court’s rulings and county signature-validity rates leaves the initiative with approximately 245,000 valid signatures. Arizona law required the campaign to produce 255,949 valid signatures.
The calculation follows an expedited ruling Thursday from Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David McDowell in Clark v. Fontes, the lawsuit challenging the petitions submitted by Protect Education, Accountability Now, the political committee behind the initiative.
At the time of McDowell’s ruling, the final outcome remained unresolved because Maricopa and Apache counties had not yet completed their reviews. The Arizona Capitol Timesreported that the Secretary of State’s initial review had reduced the campaign’s submitted total to 389,376 signatures before the court considered challenges to individual circulators, petition sheets, and duplicate signatures.
🚨 BREAKING: “PROTECT EDUCATION ACT” FALLS SHORT
Based on the trial court’s ruling in Clark (@ClarkRimsza) v Fontes and county signature validity rates, the union-backed anti-ESA initiative does not have enough valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
McDowell’s ruling left 348,269 signatures presumptively valid before application of the counties’ random-sample validity rates. The court also addressed 24,369 duplicate signatures and challenges involving more than 110 petition circulators.
“The court agrees that it is conceivable that a double count could occur, but the court cannot make a decision based upon a hypothetical double counting of duplicate signatures,” McDowell wrote.
The initiative’s supporters submitted 421,451 signatures on July 2. Save Our Schools Arizona and the Arizona Education Association were among the organizations backing the campaign.
The Goldwater Institute filed its challenge July 20, alleging that tens of thousands of the submitted signatures should be rejected because of duplicate entries, defects in circulator registrations, and petitions collected by people who were legally ineligible to circulate them.
The amended complaint raised more than 73,300 objections. Those included allegations involving unregistered paid circulators, signatures collected before circulator registration, inaccurate addresses or contact information, identification problems, and circulators whose felony convictions or other legal circumstances allegedly made them ineligible.
McDowell ultimately invalidated signatures collected by several circulators. Four circulators were disqualified because of criminal histories. The judge also invalidated several thousand signatures collected by circulator Tyrone Crispell after finding his denial that he misrepresented the initiative to prospective signers was not credible.
AFEC said Monday that nearly 70,000 signatures were disqualified through the challenge, including duplicates and signatures gathered by legally ineligible circulators.
“This is a major victory for Arizona parents, students, and the integrity of our elections,” AFEC President Scot Mussi said. “This anti-school choice initiative and its union backers spent more than $7 million dollars trying to dismantle school choice in our state, but they still could not collect enough lawful, valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.”
Campaign-finance figures compiled by Transparency USA from Arizona disclosure records show the Protect Education, Accountability Now committee had reported more than $7.5 million in total expenditures through July 30. The National Education Association accounted for approximately $6.57 million in cash and in-kind contributions, while the Arizona Education Association contributed another $810,000.
The Protect Education Act, designated Proposition 212 during the ballot-review process, would make several changes to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The measure would generally limit eligibility to families earning $150,000 or less, with exceptions including students with disabilities, certain military families, and students assigned to poorly performing public schools.
The proposal would also establish additional requirements for participating private schools and tutors, restrict certain ESA expenditures, and generally require unused annual ESA funds to be returned to the state.
The signature dispute is separate from litigation over how Proposition 212 would be described to voters. Last week, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Julie Ann Mata ordered Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to rewrite portions of the proposition’s descriptive title and “yes” and “no” statements after finding that the existing language omitted significant provisions of the measure. Judge Daniel Martin separately ordered revisions to the Arizona Legislative Council’s publicity-pamphlet analysis.
A Maricopa County Superior Court judge ordered Arizona election officials Tuesday to rewrite the descriptive title and “yes” and “no” statements for Proposition 212. The judge found that the current version omits substantial changes to enforcement and government oversight and misleadingly describes Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program as a “school voucher program.”
Judge Julie Ann Mata enjoined Secretary of State Adrian Fontes from using the current language on the official ballot or in the publicity pamphlet. She also issued a writ directing Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes to revise the language in accordance with state law and her ruling.
The court left the exact wording to Fontes and Mayes under their statutory drafting and approval authority. Mata declined to order the state to adopt replacement language proposed by the plaintiffs and denied their request for attorneys’ fees and costs.
Daryl Groves and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) filed the case against Mayes and Fontes on July 28. Protect Education, Accountability Now, the political committee sponsoring Proposition 212, participated as a friend of the court in support of the challenged language. The defendants argued that the wording fairly summarized the measure and complied with A.R.S. § 19-125(D).
AFEC called the order a “major victory for Arizona school choice” and said, “Arizona voters deserve the truth.”
BREAKING NEWS: MAJOR VICTORY FOR ARIZONA SCHOOL CHOICE
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club has won at the trial court in our lawsuit challenging the misleading ballot language drafted for Proposition 212: the union-backed initiative targeting Arizona’s ESA program.
Mata wrote that the court’s review addressed the accuracy of the ballot language and left the policy merits of Proposition 212 to voters.
The version posted by the Secretary of State before the ruling states that Proposition 212 would limit ESA eligibility to families earning $150,000 or less per year, with specified exceptions; prohibit spending on noneducational and luxury items; impose qualifications on tutors; require accreditation or testing for participating schools; and generally return unspent annual ESA allocations to the state.
The full initiative also gives the sponsoring committee or its designee standing to initiate or intervene in litigation to enforce or defend the measure. Mata found that authority to be a substantial change that the ballot title or description must disclose. She found that the existing phrase “other rules and restrictions” failed to adequately inform voters about it.
Mata also found that the “yes” statement omitted a substantial change to two existing statutory limits on government control or supervision of nonpublic schools and homeschools. Proposition 212 would amend those provisions to permit control or supervision provided elsewhere in the ESA chapter for schools and homeschools receiving ESA funds. The court did not rule on the constitutionality of that proposed change.
The judge separately found the phrase “school voucher program” misleading. She cited Arizona decisions that invalidated two voucher programs and later upheld the ESA program under a different legal structure. Mata wrote that using the phrase could lead voters to treat the legally distinct programs as equivalent.
The court rejected one of AFEC’s arguments. The group argued that describing the $150,000 income limit as “adjusted for inflation” could mislead voters because the initiative caps the annual adjustment at the lower of 2% or the change in the gross domestic product price deflator. Mata found the existing wording provided appropriate information and held that omitting the precise formula was not misleading.
In a separate decision, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin also ordered changes Tuesday to a separate piece of voter information concerning Proposition 212. The judge directed the Arizona Legislative Council to revise its analysis for the publicity pamphlet by Aug. 21.
Martin found the Council’s statement that the initiative committee would have “the power to sue the families and private schools that participate in the program for any violations of the proposition” sufficiently partisan to violate state law. He ordered the Council to strike or revise the language by Aug. 21. The Council’s adopted three-page analysis is governed by a separate law requiring an impartial explanation for the publicity pamphlet.
Mata’s case concerned the shorter ballot title and “yes” and “no” statements prepared by the Secretary of State and approved by the Attorney General.
Proposition 212’s ballot qualification remains the subject of separate litigation over petition circulators and signatures. That case, Clark v. Fontes, is a Goldwater Institute and AFEC-backed challenge to the initiative’s petition circulators and signatures. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David McDowell is expected to rule on the matter by the end of the week. The amended complaint seeks to prevent the initiative from appearing on the November ballot.
The teachers’ unions and their allies at Save Our Schools (SOS) have proven time and time again that they will do anything to kill universal school choice in Arizona.
They’ve fought expansion of the program. They’ve pushed to cap it. They’ve worked with activist reporters in the legacy media with ties to the Red for Ed teachers’ union to push false claims about it. And we all witnessed it four years ago when they made their not-so-triumphant proclamation that they had enough signatures to repeal the program—only to discover they had miscounted by more than 50,000 signatures.
But their latest attempt to overturn the program is their lowest yet.
Earlier this month, the teachers’ unions and SOS announced they had submitted more than 420,000 signatures for a ballot initiative that would end the universal eligibility of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program.
Given their track record, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club worked closely with the Goldwater Institute and other school choice advocates to review the petitions. What we found was far more disturbing than another failed signature count.
Dozens of Convicted Felons—Including Registered Sex Offenders—Hired to Collect Signatures
The teachers’ unions and SOS want Arizonans to believe that their “Protect Education Act” campaign is a grassroots effort led by concerned parents and educators. But they made a very different choice when it came time to build their campaign…
Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is blasting the anti-ESA ballot measure, which is currently facing a legal challenge from the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and the Goldwater Institute. Under Ducey’s leadership, Arizona became the nation’s leader in school choice.
The Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit earlier this week, challenging the validity of signatures submitted for the proposed “Protection Education, Accountability Now Act,” a ballot initiative that would place new restrictions on Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship (ESA) program.
According to the lawsuit, the initiative required 255,949 valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot but allegedly submitted enough invalid signatures to fall below that threshold. It contends that tens of thousands of petition signatures are subject to disqualification and raises concerns about the campaign’s signature-gathering process.
Goldwater claimed that more than 75% of the signatures were collected by paid circulators rather than volunteers and questioned whether some petition circulators met legal standards.
Out-of-state special interests are spending millions to buy their way onto Arizona's ballot. Today, Goldwater filed suit challenging the invalid signatures submitted for this anti-school choice measure. We will keep fighting to defend the rights of Arizona families and protect…
— Goldwater Institute (@GoldwaterInst) July 20, 2026
Ducey criticized the proposed initiative, arguing that it would eliminate educational options for families participating in the ESA program.
“Once again, we are reminded how little these out-of-state unions care about Arizona students and their parents,” stated Ducey. “This measure would strip tens of thousands of Arizona families of educational choices they have made for their children, forcing students out of the schools that are serving them well and back into schools they chose to leave. That is unacceptable, and we will vigorously challenge this measure at every possible step.”
Arizona’s ESA program currently serves more than 100,000 students, allowing eligible families to use state education funds for private school tuition, homeschooling expenses, and other approved educational costs.
Supporters of the program argue it expands educational opportunities and parental choice, while opponents have raised concerns about its cost and oversight.
The Goldwater Institute alleged that the ballot initiative is backed by out-of-state special interest groups seeking to limit Arizona’s school choice program.
“This is a shameless attack on Arizona’s parents, funded by an out-of-state union,” said Victor Riches, President and CEO of the Goldwater Institute. “They’re trying to game the system by turning in tens of thousands of invalid signatures in an effort to destroy the most successful school choice program in the country. This won’t happen on our watch.”
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club announced that it joined the legal challenge in support of the Goldwater Institute’s lawsuit. Greg Blackie of the organization will serve as a plaintiff in the case.
They Claim to Protect Children. Look Who They Hired!!
Arizona Free Enterprise Club @azfec Joins Legal Challenge to Union-Backed Anti-ESA Initiative. Save Our Schools and the teachers unions claim their anti-ESA campaign is about protecting children.
— Arizona Free Enterprise Club (@azfec) July 21, 2026
According to the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, it worked alongside the Goldwater Institute and other school choice advocates to review petition signatures and identify what they describe as “serious irregularities”.
The organization said the complaint also raises concerns about individuals hired to circulate petitions, including allegations involving circulators with criminal histories.
Arizona Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi released a statement, saying election laws should be enforced equally for all ballot initiatives.
“Save Our Schools and the teachers unions have spent years accusing ESA families of fraud and demanding greater scrutiny of parents, said Mussi. “Now, their own campaign is facing serious questions about the people they hired to gather signatures. Arizona’s election laws must be fully enforced. If this campaign failed to collect enough lawful and valid signatures, it must not qualify for the ballot.”
The challenged initiative is backed by Save Our Schools Arizona, the Arizona Education Association, and other organizations that have, for years, supported additional limits on ESA eligibility.
Ethan Faverino is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
