Sebastian “Seb” Matta turned 19 years old in July, 2026, the day he won the Democratic primary for Maricopa County Clerk of the Superior Court.
Matta participated in speech and debate for three years and entered four national tournaments while attending Thunderbird High School in Phoenix. The experience piqued his interest in politics.
That interest culminated to a warm August evening in 2025, when Matta began looking at offices he could run for roughly a month after he turned 18.
His attention turned to Maricopa County Clerk of the Superior Court — a seat Republicans had held for decades.
“And I saw that nobody on the Democratic side had submitted themselves to this office in nearly a decade,” Matta said in an interview with The Arizona Republic. “And I figured, ‘You know, why not?’” Matta was already familiar with the clerk’s office. His father, who works as an investigator for a law firm, would take his son to the office to get documents stamped and submitted as legal filings in personal injury cases, Matta said.
Former Maricopa County prosecutor Roberta Neil Miller ran for the seat as a Democrat in 2018 but lost in a narrow race against Republican Jeff Fine.
Fine was reelected while running unopposed in 2022. He stepped down in 2025 to work as a senior consultant for the Arizona Supreme Court.
Gov. Katie Hobbs appointed Joseph Malka to the position, though he, too, stepped down less than a year later. Chief Deputy Nancy Rodriguez became acting clerk on March 30 and will serve until the new clerk takes office.
Matta leads his opponent, former Republican state lawmaker Jeff Dial, by a sizable margin in unofficial results.
Dial has called Matta to concede the race.
Matta acknowledges his age and lack of experience
Matta likely is one of the youngest people ever elected to countywide office in Arizona, though no one has yet sorted through the records.
He acknowledged his age and lack of experience in public office might cause some to look at his credentials with trepidation.
“I just implore them to realize that I am not just an ordinary 19-year-old,” Matta said. “It takes a certain caliber of 19-year-old to collect 4,063 signatures, to get on the ballot, to raise $20,000 from over nine different states, to go to all 25 or so legislative districts in Maricopa County and drive almost 30,000 miles doing that.”
Although his primary victory was already assured — he ran unopposed — Matta doubted he could best Dial.
“I thought that this was going to be a destined loss of the Democrats,” Matta said. “This office has not been Democrat since before the ’80s. I firmly believed, signing up for this, that this was a sacrificial- lamb race.”
Historic blue wave hits this down-ballot elected office
Matta had made peace with the possibility of losing his election — no matter the margin — before the first ballot was counted.
That made the calmness Matta felt all the more surprising when initial ballot results showed him with a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent.
“I was just very overwhelmed with happiness, I suppose,” Matta said. “But I did not get any crazy outpour of emotions, which I suppose is a good thing.”
The results were part of a historic Democratic wave at the state and national level, seen by many as a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s agenda over his past two years in office.
Dial confirmed Nov. 4 he had called Matta to concede the race earlier that day.
“The race just got nationalized, obviously,” Dial told The Republic.
The former lawmaker thanked his campaign’s volunteers for their efforts as well as county election workers for running a good election.
“I wish my opponent success and hope the clerk’s office finds great success here in the future,” Dial said.
What Seb Matta says he will do as Superior Court Clerk
As for the clerk’s office itself, Matta said he didn’t see a need for a massive overhaul.
“Our courts in Maricopa County work very well,” Matta said. “There is not a lot of radical improvement that needs to be done. There need not be any kind of restructuring. Everything right now works very well.”
Instead, Matta hopes to improve upon an already solid foundation and make the clerk’s office more accessible to those seeking its services.
Those improvements could include allowing probate cases, which often deal with wills, estates and guardianships, to be initiated online, and raising public awareness about the office and what it does.
Matta hopes to also increase the number of staff interpreters and ensure someone is available to assist those who speak less common languages in Arizona, such as Urdu, Haitian Creole and Korean.
As for his planned philosophy degree, Matta said he has nixed his initial plan to pause his academic career entirely for the first several months on the job.
“If you can just do a three-credit class, that’s not that hard.”