Maricopa County, Arizona — ground zero for election conspiracies in 2020 — is looking into more than 200 registered voters suspected of being noncitizens. But the voters were flagged using a federal system that’s had its share of errors.
County Attorney Rachel Mitchell said on Monday that her office is in the early stages of investigating whether 207 voters might be ineligible, even though some of them had voted in previous elections. County Recorder Justin Heap flagged the registrations.
Heap’s office initially referred 137 voter registrations to county prosecutors for citizenship verification.
“On March 23, we received an additional 70 names,” Mitchell said in a statement. “Of the 207 names referred to this office, the Recorder has indicated that 60 cast votes.”
More than 2.5 million people are registered to vote in Maricopa County. The flagged voters make up roughly .008% of the total.
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Mitchell said that the investigation is just beginning and wouldn’t elaborate further.
Heap wrote Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on March 11 to inform him that he would designate a number of those voters he had flagged as “not eligible” to vote until the investigation into their citizenship is complete. Fontes, a Democrat, had asked Heap for the names of the voters under investigation, but Heap refused to give him that information.
How were these voters flagged?
Heap announced that his office had discovered potential noncitizen voters in February after comparing voter rolls with the federal SAVE database.
The recorder’s office checked 61,681 voter registrations that were affected by a decadeslong glitch in the state’s Motor Vehicle Department.
SAVE is an online repository maintained by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that allows public officials to check a person’s immigration or citizenship status. The agency processed 198 million cases in the 2025 fiscal year.
ProPublica reported in February that the SAVE system had given officials incorrect information on the citizenship status of some people they queried.
Ghosts of the 2020 election
Heap replaced former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, the Arizona Republican who oversaw the 2020 presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The Democrat narrowly prevailed, a result that was later confirmed in a partisan audit of county ballots. Regardless, Heap has shown skepticism toward the result.
Earlier this month, the FBI executed a search warrant for voter data from the 2020 election.
