PHOENIX — Voters whose registrations were stuck in limbo after a federal database wrongly tagged them as possible noncitizens have been returned to active status, ending a short-lived legal fight between Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap and state officials, the recorder’s office said in a news release emailed to media Friday evening.
According to the release, the breakthrough came during court-ordered mediation, when Attorney General Kris Mayes agreed to submit the voters’ citizenship documentation to the judge instead of handing it directly to the recorder. After reviewing the records, the court issued a minute entry finding them sufficient, which Heap’s office said gave it the official verification it needed.
The recorder’s office put the number of affected voters at 24, while the Attorney General’s Office and news outlets including the Arizona Mirror and KTAR News reported 25. The release said all of them are now active again, ballots have been issued to those on the Active Early Voting List, and Mayes has agreed to dismiss her complaint.
Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes had sued earlier in the week. The voters were among 207 people flagged in February after Heap ran roughly 61,000 registrations through SAVE, a federal citizenship-check system that has been shown to misidentify U.S. citizens, KTAR reported.
In the release, Heap said the dispute “could have been resolved weeks ago” and that his office’s position never changed. He thanked Judge Christopher T. Whitten for getting the verification resolved in a matter of hours. The general election is Nov. 3.
Sources: Maricopa County Recorder’s Office news release (emailed to Thee Arizona Times), KTAR News, Arizona Mirror. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
Photo: Tony Webster / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
