Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is being called on to immediately address his office’s failure to provide county recorders with timely, complete, and usable federal felony-conviction data as Arizona approaches the November General Election.
Maricopa County Recorder is calling out Fontes following months of administrative outreach and technical follow-up by county election officials to resolve the issue.
Under A.R.S. § 16-165(A)(4), county recorders are required to cancel the registration of electors convicted of a felony who have not had their civil rights restored. To carry out that responsibility, recorders depend on the Secretary of State to obtain and provide critical voter-eligibility information from state and federal agencies. When the Secretary fails to provide that information, county recorders cannot identify and cancel every ineligible registration the law requires them to cancel.
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One of those critical sources is federal felony-conviction data obtained by the Secretary of State from the U.S. Department of Justice. The most recent federal felony report received by the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office covers only the second quarter of 2025. That leaves more than a year of federal felony conviction data unavailable to the Recorder’s Office as it conducts list maintenance ahead of the General Election.
Heap says the problem is not limited to the missing 2025 and 2026 data. The federal felony records provided by the Secretary contain sizable gaps dating back to 2022, and the Secretary’s Office has been unwilling or unable to confirm that the records it has provided are complete.
According to Heap, even when felony records are provided, the Secretary of State fails to provide them in the proper electronic format and import them into the statewide voter registration system as required by his own Election Procedures Manual. Instead, the Secretary only provides static statewide PDF reports, bypassing the automated hard match system and forcing Recorder staff to manually identify Maricopa County records, cross-reference them, and manually enter the information one record at a time. Bypassing the automated imports destroys statewide uniformity across Arizona’s 15 counties under federal law (52 U.S.C. § 20507(b)(1)) by forcing each county to implement ad hoc manual workarounds. What should be routine voter-registration maintenance has instead become a labor-intensive manual process.
“This is not a minor administrative delay. It is a failure that directly affects our ability to keep the voter rolls accurate,” said Heap. “Arizona law requires my office to cancel the registration when we receive qualifying felony-conviction information. But we cannot remove an ineligible elector we have not been told about. The Secretary of State has allowed the federal felony data to fall years behind, cannot assure us that prior records are complete, and has made the limited records we do receive harder to process. With the General Election approaching, this needs to be fixed now. County recorders are prepared to do our job. The Secretary of State needs to do his.”
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