Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap made a big hullabaloo in February by using the feds’ controversial SAVE system to find 60 non-citizen county residents who cast ballots in previous elections. The county attorney announced on Monday that only eight of those voters were actually non-citizens. (That’s about one voter per month of investigation if you’re counting).
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After a more than seven-month-long “large-scale” investigation, county attorney Rachel Mitchell said in a press conference that her office had discovered that eight of those 60 voters weren’t citizens. The other 52 had been incorrectly flagged as non-citizens.
“Our findings today would not change the outcome of any past election,” Mitchell said, but added that “every ineligible voter dilutes the votes of a citizen, and it’s crucial that we fix this going forward.”
Seven of the eight voters were incorrectly registered through a Motor Vehicle Department glitch the previous county recorder discovered in 2024. The other voter had been registered through a mailed-in form. They’d still been registered to vote in 2012 despite answering “no” to the form’s citizenship question.
All of the eight voters are in the U.S. legally and “most have lived in the U.S. for decades,” including one person who has lived in the county for more than 72 years, Mitchell said. Maricopa County has 2.5 million registered voters.
The eight non-citizen voters cast ballots in nine elections spanning back to the 2012 General Election. The unidentified non-citizen voters cast ballots in general elections, Republican primaries, and the 2025 Glendale special election. There was no pattern by political party. Five weren’t registered with a party, two were Republicans, and one was a Democrat.
“What we have found so far obviously is not adequate to swing an election,” Mitchell said. “No more than three voted in any particular election.”
For context, in the 2020 presidential election, Arizona had the second-closest margin of about .31 percent, second only to Georgia with a margin of .24 percent. Joe Biden defeated Donald J. Trump by 10,457 votes in that highly contested election. In the 2022 Arizona Attorney General’s race, Democrat Kris Mayes beat Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh by 280 votes. But even with exquisitely tight margins, any non-citizen voters weren’t even close to making a difference in either race.
It could have, however, made a difference in the battle between Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson in the presidential election of 1832. That one—the closest in US history—was decided by a gobsmacking four votes. But that’s if all eight voters turned out for the same election. And that didn’t happen. No more than three voters cast ballots in the same election.
Still, Mitchell argued that “one is too many.” She announced that her office will be “expanding the scope of this investigation to ensure that there are no other issues with the voter roll in Maricopa County outside of what we’ve already found from the MVD glitch.” Her office will review the remaining 147 names the Recorder’s office referred to her as non-citizens registered to vote.
In a post on social media, Stephen Richer, whose office discovered the glitch, wrote on social media that the saga “is all so silly” as the number of non-citizen voters casting ballots in Maricopa County elections went from “thousands” to 60, and then all the way down to eight.
Neither the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office nor the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office responded to New Times’ request for comment.
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Mitchell didn’t announce any charging decisions against the eight voters, nor did she name names. The investigation remains open. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office is also investigating these alleged non-citizen voters. The office’s investigation is ongoing. Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the office, declined to comment further.
Voting in Arizona when you’re not “appropriately eligible” is illegal and is a felony offense in Arizona, Mitchell said. However, she noted that she’ll be considering “whether a jury would be willing to convict when I cannot show that the person intentionally even registered to vote” before making a charging decision. Federally, voting without being properly registered is a misdemeanor offense.
In a statement to New Times, Esther Winnie, the spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, wrote that “it doesn’t matter if (the noncitizen voters) were incorrectly registered or sent a ballot – it is illegal for them to vote in our elections.” She declined to comment on whether the Department of Justice would consider federal charges.
The glitch
More than two years ago, county election officials, under former Recorder Stephen Richer, discovered that nearly 100,000 Arizona residents were erroneously allowed to vote in full-ballot elections for years due to a disconnect between the state’s MVD and local election officials. The disconnect led the state to incorrectly mark those votes as proof of citizenship when they were not.
Since October 1996, Arizona residents have been required to provide proof of citizenship to get a regular driver’s license. Noncitizens, such as green card holders, are issued a different type of license. Before 1996, there was no such differentiation.
In 2004, the state enacted its proof-of-citizenship law, which requires voters to show they’re U.S. citizens to vote in state and local elections. Ever since then, if county election officials saw a license issuance date after October 1996, they knew that person had already provided the state with documented proof of citizenship.
However, when residents who received a pre-October 1996 license requested a replacement card after that date – because an address had changed or the original had been lost – MVD would also update the issuance date when replacing the license. That new post-1996 issuance date would lead election officials to assume those residents had already provided proof of citizenship mistakenly.
At the time, Gov. Katie Hobbs directed the MVD to fix the problem and ordered an “independent audit” to ensure systems were functioning properly. It’s unclear what the status of that audit is. The Governor’s Office acknowledged New Times’ question about the status of the audit but didn’t respond by the time of publication. The Arizona Department of Transportation, which oversees the MVD, didn’t respond to New Times’ request to comment.
During Monday’s press conference, Mitchell called on the Arizona Legislature to find a fix to the loophole. Her office will be working on legislation, including addressing voting list maintenance and training MVD workers and third-party vendors, to propose during the upcoming 2027 session.
“The workers need to make it crystal clear that the information that they are gathering is for voter registration and that the person must be a U.S. citizen,” she said. “When our detectives were interviewing people, the vast majority did not remember registering to vote or being asked if they wanted to register.”
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