Maricopa County recorder's claim of 137 noncitizen voters may be too high

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap claimed last week that his office had identified 137 noncitizens on the county’s voter rolls — but that number may be inflated, as the database he used to arrive at it has a history of inaccuracy.

In a press release, Heap’s office said it identified the noncitizens while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of 61,681 voters impacted by a longstanding state coding error by running them through a digital database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It said the database confirmed the citizenship of 58,782 of those voters, or 95% of them, but flagged 137, or 0.2%, as noncitizens. Of those, it said 60 had voted in prior elections.

But experts have long warned that the system that the office used — called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — is unreliable. A ProPublica investigation found that the system provided incorrect information to at least five states. In Texas, election officials in several counties found it had identified people as noncitizens who had already proved their citizenship to the state Department of Public Safety.

It’s unclear whether Maricopa County attempted to weed out false positives from its data. Judy Keane, a spokesperson for the recorder’s office, declined to answer questions about whether staff took any additional steps to confirm the voters’ noncitizenship status beyond running their names through SAVE.



https://www.votebeat.org/arizona/2026/02/18/maricopa-county-justin-heap-137-noncitizens-registered-voter-rolls-save-dhs-database/