Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap says the U.S. Department of Justice told him the federal felony reports Arizona needs for voter list maintenance are available through the first quarter of 2026, contradicting Secretary of State Adrian Fontes' claim that DOJ had not provided them. Arizona Daily Independent reported the dispute and Heap's statement on Thursday, credit: ADI Staff Reporter. https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2026/09/24/fontes-claims-regarding-doj-felony-report-found-to-be-false/
"I am disappointed that Secretary Fontes would gamble the trust of Arizona voters on a lie," Heap said, adding that Fontes has not produced an updated report since the second quarter of 2025. Heap said DOJ felony data are missing for at least three full quarters and that, following his outreach, Fontes received the second quarter 2026 report on Thursday. Heap called on Fontes to immediately produce the missing reports so county recorders can update the rolls.
The consequence is simple and serious. By law, county recorders must cancel registrations for voters convicted of felonies who have not had their civil rights restored, under A.R.S. § 16-165(A)(4). To do that, they depend on the Secretary of State to obtain and transmit eligibility data from state and federal agencies. When that pipeline fails, ineligible registrations stay on the rolls heading into the General Election.
ADI reports the most recent federal felony report Maricopa County has received covers only the second quarter of 2025, leaving more than a year of federal felony conviction data unavailable as list maintenance ramps up. Heap also says gaps in the records stretch back to 2022 and that the Secretary's Office has been unwilling or unable to confirm the completeness of what it has sent.
According to Heap, even when records arrive, Fontes' office is not importing them into the statewide voter registration system as required by his own Elections Procedures Manual, and instead is pushing out static PDF files. That bypasses automated matching and forces county staff to manually identify, cross-reference, and hand-enter records, undermining statewide uniformity required under 52 U.S.C. § 20507(b)(1) and turning routine work into an avoidable slog.
Garrett Archer, a former Secretary of State employee who managed the AVID statewide voter database project, defended Fontes on X, saying the bottleneck is at DOJ and calling Heap's move a political stunt, per ADI. Archer's tenure matters because AVID's reliability is already under scrutiny.
In September 2024, Gov. Katie Hobbs' office publicly acknowledged what it called an AVID interface programming error that mishandled Motor Vehicle Division data, querying the issue date of duplicate driver licenses rather than originals. That glitch affected how proof of citizenship was processed for voter registrations, ADI noted, reinforcing the perception of chronic tech mismanagement around the system.
