Fontes wants answers from Maricopa County recorder about non-citizen voting claims

After Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap said a federal database flagged over 100 non-citizens on the county’s voter rolls, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said he’s concerned about reports that the tool is inaccurate.

The same day that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Arizona and made unfounded claims that the state’s elections are “an absolute disaster,” Heap announced that his office flagged 137 registered Maricopa County voters who are not American citizens.

Heap, a Republican and Trump ally, said his office used the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database to check the eligibility of over 61,000 voters who were affected by a high-profile flaw in the way the state’s election systems communicated with a Department of Transportation database discovered in 2024. Due to the error, those people were never required to provide documented proof of citizenship before registering, which is required by state law.

“That review confirmed U.S. citizenship and full ballot eligibility for 58,782 voters,” Heap said in a statement. “Those individuals’ registrations have already been updated to ensure they are able to receive a full ballot in future elections.”

But, he added, “the review also identified 137 registered voters who are not U.S. citizens. Of those, 60 individuals have voted in prior elections.”

If true, that would mean that around 0.005% of the county’s 2.5 million voters were registered even though they are ineligible to vote.

But, in a letter to Heap, Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state, said he is concerned the Recorder’s Office didn’t do enough due diligence to ensure the 137 people flagged using the SAVE tool are actually non-citizens.

Gage Skidmore/CC BY 2.0

Fontes said the SAVE program is prone to problems, citing reporting by Pro Publica that found the tool has repeatedly made mistakes by erroneously flagging voter registration problems, especially for naturalized citizens who were born outside of the U.S.

“Further, it is widely documented that the SAVE program has a high error rate, thus requiring verification of any data used by that system to impact an individual’s voting rights,” Fontes wrote.

Fontes, who was the Maricopa County recorder from 2017 to 2021, said the SAVE tool has long been used in Arizona to find proof of citizenship that is unavailable in other databases.

“It is alarming to me, however, to hear that the SAVE database was used to identify voters who are now publicly accused of being non-citizens and thus illegally registered to vote without seeing detailed information about how that information was verified to ensure it is accurate,” he wrote.

Fontes said state law requires county election officials to notify a person when questions are raised about the validity of their voter registration and give them 35 days to resolve the issues.

“Any action that has been taken to cancel these voters without going through a verification process that is consistent with state law is highly concerning to me and likely illegal,” Fontes wrote.

The Recorder’s Office did not respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear whether Heap sent out those notifications. However, the office said it had no responsive records when Votebeat requested copies of those notices.

Fontes asked Heap to provide his office with the names of the 137 people flagged by SAVE, their current voter registration status, and information about the process the recorder used to notify them of the problem.

He also asked how the Recorder’s Office “independently verified” information provided by the federal tool.