PHOENIX — On Thursday, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap announced that he has confirmed with U.S. Department of Justice officials that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ claims that the Department of Justice has not provided the Arizona Federal Felony Report are untruthful.
“As the County Recorder for Arizona’s most populated county, I am disappointed that Secretary Fontes would gamble the trust of Arizona voters on a lie,” said Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap. “I have personally spoken with Department of Justice officials who confirmed that the Arizona Federal Felony Reports are available through the first quarter of 2026, yet Fontes has failed to provide an updated report, as required by law, since the second quarter of 2025. Arizona is missing at least three full quarters of felony data and voter ineligibility due to Secretary Fontes failure to follow the law. Further, as a result of my communication with the Department of Justice, today Secretary Fontes received the second quarter 2026 Federal Felony Report. I am calling on Secretary Fontes to produce the missing reports immediately, so that Recorders can do their job and ensure integrity on our voter rolls.”
Heap called 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.
A former secretary of state employee-turned-pundit, Garrett Archer, who served as project manager for the programming error-riddled Access Voter Information Database, known as AVID, weighed in on the dispute in defense of Fontes.
Archer’s previous role is notable because AVID, Arizona’s statewide voter registration database, has experienced documented programming problems. In September 2024, Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office publicly acknowledged what it described as an “AVID interface’s programming error” involving the system’s interaction with Motor Vehicle Division records.
According to the Governor’s Office, AVID had been programmed to query the issuance date of a duplicate driver’s license rather than the date the original license was issued. The problem affected how the system processed MVD information used as documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration.
Despite his previous role managing the AVID project, Archer defended Fontes in the current dispute.
“I spoke with Fontes about this. The bottleneck is currently with the DOJ. He calls this release a purely political stunt by Heap,” Archer wrote on X.
Arizona State Rep. John Gillette, chairman of the House Elections Committee, responded by pointing to broader problems involving the statewide voter-registration system.
“Did Fontes blame the DOJ for the system wide reconciliation issues, and duplicates as well,” scoffed Gillette.
This is difficult to take seriously coming from Fontes.
His office allows a Delaware-based 501(c)(3) NGO to participate in a two-way data exchange with Arizona voter-registration information network.
At the same time, Arizona’s voter-registration system, AVID, has been plagued… https://t.co/3pdgqIvMhR pic.twitter.com/PiZaL47ntG
— Rep. John Gillette AZ House LD30 (@AzRepGillette) September 24, 2026
Archer’s history with AVID is relevant to the exchange because Heap’s criticism involves how federal felony-conviction information is handled through Arizona’s voter registration infrastructure. Heap says the Secretary of State has failed to properly import the federal felony records into the statewide system, instead providing counties with static PDF reports that require manual processing.
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