Last-minute Arizona court battle restores 25 wrongly purged voters

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

After lawsuit, Maricopa County reinstates 25 voters mistakenly flagged in citizenship check The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has agreed to reinstate the registrations of a group of voters falsely flagged as noncitizens by an error-prone federal data tool earlier this year, following a lawsuit by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, came weeks after county detectives found that the voters were U.S. citizens. Mayes, a Democrat, alleged that Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, had nonetheless kept the voters in “not eligible” status on the county’s voter roll, despite investigators’ findings. Voters in that status remain on the rolls but may not receive mail ballots and are required to show proof of their citizenship before being allowed to vote.

With voting already underway in the 2026 general election, Mayes asked a judge to order that the voters be fully reinstated and be mailed ballots immediately.

“Time is of the essence in this matter that involves the voting rights of twenty-five Maricopa County voters who will be denied their right to vote in the 2026 general election absent relief from this Court,” she wrote in her suit, which also requested an injunction barring Heap from preventing the voters from casting a ballot.

In a statement at the time, Heap said Mayes had “chosen partisan political theater over enforcing Arizona law.”

“My duty is to follow Arizona law, not the political demands of Kris Mayes,” he added. “No attorney general has the authority to simply declare Arizona’s citizenship requirements optional.”

However, after mediation, Mayes on Friday announced that Heap had agreed to reinstate the voters.

Lawsuit adds to long saga over how to handle group of voters

The 11th-hour legal battle was the latest update in a saga that stretches back to the spring, when Heap referred 207 potential noncitizens registered to vote to county and state prosecutors for review. Of those, 60 had previously cast ballots. He identified the potential noncitizens while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of 61,681 voters impacted by a longstanding state record-keeping error.

The federal tool that flagged the voters as noncitizens — called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — has repeatedly proven to be unreliable, and Heap has never directly addressed whether he attempted to confirm the 207 voters’ citizenship before forwarding them to prosecutors.

But, after an investigation, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell announced last month that only eight of the 60 voters who had cast ballots were actually noncitizens. Mitchell, a Republican, said the remaining 52 were U.S. citizens. Another 147 voters referred to prosecutors remain under investigation.

Nick Klingerman, the attorney general’s criminal division chief, wrote in a letter earlier this week that Heap had yet to update the registration status of 24 of the 52 citizen voters cleared by Mitchell. He warned that his office would sue if Heap didn’t remedy the problem. The lawsuit filed Wednesday said 25 voters were still marked as “not eligible.” Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said one voter was reinstated following Klingerman’s letter earlier in the week, but two more were found to be marked “not eligible.”

Klingerman’s letter noted he’d also reached out in May to express concerns about Heap’s handling of suspected noncitizen voters identified through the SAVE tool.

That letter came after Votebeat reported Heap might be using the wrong process to change the voters’ registration statuses. In marking them as “not eligible,” he appeared to be using a process outlined in the state’s election rulebook that applies to new registrants suspected of being noncitizens, rather than following requirements in a state law that lays out how to notify and remove potential noncitizens who are already on the voter rolls.

Heap, Mitchell trade blows as lawsuit lands

Heap claimed the delay in updating the voters’ status was on Mitchell and Mayes. He said their offices had yet to provide documentation proving the voters’ citizenship, despite his office’s requests. He originally said his office would restore the voters to their full registration status when it received that documentation.

“A press conference is not proof of citizenship,” Heap said. “Neither is a lawsuit.”

But in a statement Thursday, Mitchell pushed back hard, saying Heap had put the voters in “not eligible” status against the guidance of her office and that she could not “stand in place of the recorder to gather proof of citizenship.”

“This is not my opinion,” Mitchell said. “This is not a made-up process. This is the law.”

Mitchell added that the county was “in a place where there is no reason to question the citizenship of 52 voters.”

“The law demands that they be allowed to vote,” she said.

Kate Brophy McGee, the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which shares election administration duties with Heap, told reporters on Thursday that she felt the lawsuit was “an appropriate step” by Mayes.

“I am expecting, and believing, that the recorder will do the right thing and restore those voters’ rights, and ensure that they are in fact able to exercise their rights,” she said.

Heap and the largely-GOP board have long been embroiled in a feud over control of the county’s election apparatus. Relations between the two have recently deteriorated after 12News broke news that staffers in the recorder’s office had asked the FBI to investigate purported suspicious activity inside the tabulation room at the county’s election headquarters.

Investigators ultimately found that the allegations, which came from a local conservative group, were baseless.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.