Maricopa County recorder, AG's office spar over investigation of potential noncitizen voters

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap has referred potential noncitizens that were on the county’s voter rolls to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

But that didn’t happen before the Attorney General’s Office told Heap he was violating state law by not turning the names over.

Sasha Hupka, who’s written about this for Votebeat, joined The Show to talk more.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Sasha, good morning.

SASHA HUPKA: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So, let’s start sort of at the beginning here. Recorder Heap was looking for potential people who shouldn’t be on the voter rolls, shouldn’t be allowed to vote. How did he go about trying to find these people?

SASHA HUPKA: Well, for what it’s worth, I think that if you ask Heap the way he might put it is that he was actually looking to identify whether a certain group of voters impacted by a state error in 2024 had citizenship documents, various —

MARK BRODIE: This was the MVD situation, right?

SASHA HUPKA: That’s correct. Yes. So there is this group of voters for whom the state, its voter registration system and driver’s license system screwed up. And they can’t tell if this group of thousands and thousands of voters across the state ever turned in documents proving their citizenship, which is a requirement here in Arizona. That’s something like a passport or a birth certificate. They can’t tell if they did that. And so these voters have sort of been stuck in limbo.

And Heap sort of had this idea of, "Well, maybe if I run these voters through a federal database, I’ll be able to determine if these voters are, in fact, citizens."

The database he used, however, is the SAVE database. It’s run by DHS. And the Trump administration recently expanded it such that Heap could do this type of maneuver, where he could run a list of thousands of voters through this database and sort of get back an answer: "Are they a citizen, or are they not?"

And the problem with that database is that it’s extremely unreliable. And so Heap ran this group of voters through this database. He identified at the time 147 voters who he says are noncitizens. And I think there’s been a question ever since around this group of voters of, are those 147 people truly noncitizens? Or is the database mistaken on some or all of them? And that’s sort of where we are today, is in the process of figuring that out.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so he has now turned those names over to both the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office. But he turned them over to the County Attorney’s Office first and basically had to be threatened into turning them over to the AG’s office. Like, someone from the AG’s office had to write him what looked like, based on your reporting, a pretty strongly worded letter saying, "You got to do this."

SASHA HUPKA: That’s how it appears. You know, the documents that I obtained show this kind of over the course of several weeks, this communication between Heap and the AG’s Office, where the AG’s Office says repeatedly, "Hey, under state law, you need to hand these names over to us. You can’t just hand them to the (County) Attorney’s Office and be done. State law says you have to give them to us both."

And Heap comes back and says, "Well, no, your interpretation of law is wrong and I don’t have to do that." And it’s only when the Attorney General’s Office sends Heap another letter saying, "Look, you need to do this. And if not," you know, they suggest that they might take some sort of legal action against him, that he actually handed over these names to them on the day of the deadline. It’s also worth noting he handed over 207 names.

MARK BRODIE: Which is more than what he originally had identified.

SASHA HUPKA: Yes, to the Attorney General’s Office and the (County) Attorney’s Office. And I think that that is also very interesting because, as you noted, that is more names. That’s 70 more names, and we still don’t know where those extra 70 people came from. There’s kind of an unanswered question about that here.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so do we know why he seemed so reluctant to turn these names over to the AG?

SASHA HUPKA: It’s a little unclear. If you look at his letter and what he says, he essentially says he’s using a different process than the one the AG’s Office says that he has to use. He’s arguing, "Hey, I’m using this other process. It doesn’t require me to turn over the names to you, and it would be premature to do so."

The AG’s Office comes back to that and says, "No, you’re using the wrong process." And this was very interesting for me to see in the letters, because back in March, I had reported out that Heap seemed to be using this different process that legal experts and election experts at the time from across the aisle told me was the incorrect process.

So, it was interesting to me to see the Attorney General’s Office saying, "No, you’re wrong, you’re using the wrong process." But I think there’s just, again, a lot of sort of unanswered questions around this because Heap hasn’t answered my questions about this.

I asked repeatedly before he referred to the County Attorney’s Office, "Hey, are you going to refer these people? You said you were going to." And I never quite managed to get an answer from him on on why he was delaying and referring. And, again, where those extra 70 people came from or why exactly he was using the process that he is appearing to use.

MARK BRODIE: So what happens to these people who belong to the names that have now been turned over to the county attorney and the AG’s Office?

SASHA HUPKA: Well, the county attorney and the AG, under state law, they need to investigate this. And so, they’re going to be running these sort of parallel investigations, as I understand it. I think that the next turn in this is going to be seeing, what do they find?

Are these people indeed all noncitizens? And I think it’s worth noting that this is a very, very small segment of Maricopa County’s voter rolls that we’re talking about here — 207 people. Maricopa County has about roughly 2.6 million people registered to vote. That’s a rough number for what it’s worth. I haven’t checked today. ... It changes by the day. But that’s about what we’ve got. And so, this is a very, very tiny fraction of that.

I think that, though, we know that noncitizen voting is just incredibly rare. So it’s just a matter of figuring out, truly, are all these people noncitizens or not? And if they’re not, what does that mean? What happens from there? Have there been changes to their registration status already?

Heap has seemed to suggest there are under this process that he’s running, that he’s moved these people to inactive status — which is not canceling them, so they’re not entirely off the rolls. But what it does mean is they won’t be able to vote until they hand over proof of citizenship. And so, I just think there’s a lot of questions about how does this sort of go forward from there. But all of this will sort of come back to, what do the AG’s Office and the County Attorney’s Office find about these people?

MARK BRODIE: And very briefly, Sasha, it’s worth noting that even of those 207 potential nonvoters, not all of them are suspected to have actually voted, right?

SASHA HUPKA: Yes, so that’s correct. You can be on the voter rolls and have never cast a ballot. And so, there is a segment of these people, at least according to Heap’s office, who are on the rolls but they don’t seem to have any evidence they’ve actually voted in an election. And then, there’s a segment who they say have voted.

And, again, it’s just a question of, are these people actually noncitizens or not? You know, he says 60 people of this group have voted. I would find it somewhat difficult to believe, based on many, many studies around noncitizen voting patterns, that all 60 of those people voted in a single election.

So, are we talking about 60 people who voted dating back to the year 2000? OK, maybe that is plausible with what I know about the rarity of noncitizen voting. But certainly, at least on its face, these numbers kind of raise my eyebrow a little bit and they raised experts’ eyebrows too.

And that’s been my reporting up until this point. Take this number with a grain of salt until state and county prosecutors actually do an investigation here.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, we’ll see what comes of that. That is Sasha Hupka with Votebeat. Sasha, thanks as always.

SASHA HUPKA: Thank you.

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