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Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office on Wednesday over its handling of the registration statuses of a group of voters falsely flagged as noncitizens by an error-prone federal data tool earlier this year, demanding that the office restore the voters’ ability to cast a ballot in the upcoming midterm election.
Her lawsuit comes weeks after county detectives found that the voters were U.S. citizens. Mayes, a Democrat, alleges that Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, has 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 is asking 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 requests an injunction barring Heap from preventing the voters from casting a ballot.
A spokesperson for the recorder’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 11th-hour legal battle is 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.” A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office didn’t immediately respond to a question about why the number increased.
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.
Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.
