Last month, over 80,000 Maricopa County voters received letters from Recorder Justin Heap’s office informing them that the Recorder’s Office had received notification that they had gotten driver’s licenses in another state. According to the letter, if they didn’t respond in 90 days, they’d be moved to the inactive voter list.
The problem, as Votebeat’s Jen Fifield recently reported, is that this wasn’t true — the letter had been sent by mistake and the voters weren’t actually in danger of being moved to the inactive voter list.
Fifield joined The Show to discuss what happened here, and the broader context.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Jen, good morning.
JEN FIFIELD: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
DINGMAN: Thank you for being here. Jen, what did Heap's office have to say about this mix-up? Were there actually issues with these voters' registration status?
FIFIELD: Yes, so these are the 80,000 voters in Maricopa County that actually do need to take action. So if you got one of these letters, just know that you will need to do something to keep voting in state and local elections. This goes back to last summer, the state discovered that they hadn't been collecting voter citizenship for about 200,000 voters in the state over time for the past two years on accident. So our state law requires the citizenship proof to vote in state and local elections.
This is something that's different from other states where you just have to attest to your citizenship. We have to provide documentation. So the state does not have it on file. Even if you've lived here for 20 years or longer, you might be getting one of these letters in the mail.
The problem was that Heap's office accidentally sent this letter that said the incorrect thing that they had moved out of state. And so now they're getting two letters. They got a second letter in the mail, these voters did, saying, hey, that first letter was a mistake. Here's this super complicated other thing that's going on that you'll have to act on.
DINGMAN: Trust us, this is the real letter you need to pay attention to. Well, as I recall, he ran on a platform of criticizing the recorder's office as kind of disorganized and characterized it as an embarrassment for the state. What is he saying about this latest mix-up?
FIFIELD: So, initially his office, Recorder Justin Heap's office said this was all the vendor, the vendor that they hired to send out these letters, sent out the wrong letter. Come to find out, and 12 News was the first to report this, that actually they did approve the proof for the wrong letter the office did. So, but these mistakes can happen, right? And this is what Heap is learning.
Like you said, he got elected after saying, look at all the mistakes in our elections. I'm going to come, I'm going to clean it up. Well, this is what past recorders have said, that's what Adrian Fontes has said, that he had a problem with the contractor when he was in office, you know, this is what the supervisors said when they took power away from Fontes. It's just history repeating itself, where people get in office and realize, wow, it is kind of complicated to run elections.
DINGMAN: Turns out, if we, if we learned anything from “Parks and Recreation,” local government, very complicated.
FIFIELD: Very complicated, yes, and you know, there's these problems where people are now very confused about, you know, their voter status and if I had one recommendation, it would be before you vote again, whether it's in the special election we have coming up for Congressional District 7 on Tuesday or just, you know, next November, even the next November, when whenever you vote, check your status beforehand and see if everything's OK.
DINGMAN: Well, Jen, you were just at the beginning of our conversation sending a message out to voters who may be listening to this and might have received these letters, as I gather you have heard from some of those voters. What are they saying when they reach out to you?
FIFIELD: Well, when they first start getting this incorrect letter, they were completely confused and actually very angry because, you know, obviously they hadn't moved out of state. They were afraid of identity theft because it says, you know, hey, your identity is in a different state now. That's very scary with everything going on with, you know, the, you know, all the hacking going on that you could potentially that could happen to you, but that didn't happen.
So that was their first concern, but really the second letter is, is just as confusing and it has been confusing. This is not just Maricopa County, remember, this is 200,000 across the state. So for months now, I've been writing these articles that are, you know, Votebeat.org, you can look. Get up, just information articles. If you did get this letter, no matter where you are in the state, you do need to provide citizenship proof. It's still confusing because like I said, they've been here, I've lived here since 1960, what's going on?
DINGMAN: Right. Now, Jen, all of this comes as Justin Heap is trying to get more power over local elections in court, right? Where does that effort stand?
FIFIELD: Right, so Justin Heap came in and he rejected the contract for who ran what part of the county's elections. He splits these duties with the county supervisors, and he got in and said, no, I want to do things like early in-person voting. I want to be the one to set those locations up.
And so they're, they're currently still In this fight over that, he filed a lawsuit about it, and now the supervisors are going to countersue just in a couple days here and ask the court, you know, we need to figure this out. We need to figure out who does what over elections, help us figure this out so we can actually do that coming up here pretty quickly.
DINGMAN: There is also some federal context here, right, Jen, President Trump is seeking to expand the administration's access to citizenship info when people register to vote. What's the latest on that effort?
FIFIELD: Right, so Trump came in and he said, listen, the federal law currently, you know, you just have to attest on this form that you're a citizen under penalty of perjury, which, you know, is serious. We don't have evidence that it's a widespread problem. But he came in and said, we need to be proving our citizenship when we register with these documents. So that's part of an executive order that he issued.
Now that executive order, most of it is on hold right now in courts, and it doesn't affect Arizona as much as other states because again, we're already trying to collect the documentation. But you know, we'll see how that plays out nationally, and I think these letters, because all of that's going on, it caused people to think that something, you know, nefarious was going on, where Republicans were trying to remove them from the rolls and, which makes sense with all the federal context, but really it was just due to the state error.
DINGMAN: Now, just about 30 seconds left here, Jen, you mentioned the upcoming special election to fill Congressman Raùl Grijalva's seat next week. Is there any indication that in that pool of 200,000 voters who are in limbo here, that any of them are experiencing any similar confusion?
FIFIELD: Well, I know that in some counties, you might have had your registration been put on hold if you're on this list, and this is not in Maricoppa, but in other counties, if you tried to file an update and didn't provide the citizenship documentation when you did, so you just need to check your record and make sure everything's OK before Tuesday if you plan to vote in person.
