The Arizona Felony Election Files
By Linda Brickman
Who Is Responsible for Keeping Arizona’s Voter Rolls Accurate – And Is Adrian Fontes Interfering with Another Election?
I THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A SIMPLE QUESTION UNTIL…
Arizona law says a county recorder (15 recorders in Arizona) shall cancel a voter registration when the registered person has been convicted of a felony and the conviction has not been reversed or set aside, once the recorder receives qualifying notice from the court, the Secretary of State, or another authorized source.
So, I assumed the process worked something like this:
- The conviction occurs.
- The information reaches election officials.
- The voter record is matched.
- If the person is no longer eligible, the registration is canceled.
Simple. Except apparently, it is not. Enter Adrian Fontes – AGAIN!
On September 24, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap publicly said his office had not received an updated federal felony report from Secretary of State Adrian Fontes since the second quarter of 2025. Heap said he personally contacted U.S. Department of Justice officials and was told reports were available through the first quarter of 2026. He further said that, following those conversations, the Department of Justice sent the second-quarter 2026 report to the Secretary of State that same day. Those statements are Heap’s account of what DOJ told him; I have not located a public DOJ document independently confirming that transmission history.
That alone raised an obvious question: If the county recorder is required to cancel certain registrations after receiving felony-conviction information, what happens when the recorder does not timely receive the information needed to identify those records?
And then I opened Arizona’s own 2025 Elections Procedures Manual. That made the question even more interesting…
WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN – DID FONTES COMPLY?
The Election Procedures Manual says the Secretary of State receives periodic felony-conviction files from Arizona courts. It also says the Secretary receives additional felony-conviction information from both Arizona courts and the U.S. Department of Justice in various non-electronic formats.
According to the manual, those records are supposed to be converted into the proper electronic format and imported into Arizona’s statewide voter-registration system.
Then the matching begins…
A “hard match” occurs when specified portions of the voter’s name, date of birth and last four digits of the Social Security number match an existing registration. The system may automatically place that voter record into canceled status.
A “soft match” occurs when some — but not all — of those identifying elements match, or when a hard match points to more than one registration. Those records are flagged for the appropriate county recorder to investigate individually.
In other words, Arizona’s written procedure anticipates something very important: Names alone are not enough.
A middle initial may appear in one record and disappear in another. Names may be entered differently. More than one record may resemble the same person. That is precisely why the system uses additional identifying information and why questionable matches are supposed to be reviewed rather than simply ignored or automatically canceled.
And this is where the current dispute becomes much more than an argument between two elected officials… If the necessary felony records are not entered into the statewide system in the manner the EPM describes, the matching process itself may not begin when it should. Heap says that is what has happened here.
Fontes disputes the significance of the problem and, in comments reported by The Arizona Republic, characterized the number of federal cases involved as “de minimis,” while accusing Heap of exploiting a technical issue for political purposes.
The dispute has also moved directly into the race for Secretary of State. Republican candidate Alex Kolodin has publicly echoed Heap’s concerns about the missing federal felony data and voter-roll maintenance. In a September campaign communication titled “Fontes Let the Felony Data Go Dark,” Kolodin repeated Heap’s allegations that counties had not received current federal felony-conviction information and argued that the problem could leave ineligible registrations unresolved. Kolodin has also discussed the issue publicly, saying the lack of data makes it difficult to determine the extent of the problem.
Those are Kolodin’s and Heap’s allegations. But the underlying question for this article remains narrower: what records were received, when were they received, how were they processed, and did county recorders receive the information Arizona’s procedures require them to have? And can Fontes prove he even sent the files and when?
And whether the number is ten, one hundred or ten thousand does not answer the administrative question: Were The Records Received, Were They Processed as The EPM Requires, And Did the County Recorders Receive What They Needed to Do Their Jobs?
That is the question I want this article to answer.
BUT NOT EVERY FELON IS AN INELIGIBLE VOTER
This distinction matters…
Arizona law does not say that every person who has ever been convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting. A person is disqualified only while the felony conviction continues to suspend that person’s civil rights. A.R.S. § 16-101 expressly allows a person whose civil rights have been restored to register again.
For someone with a first Arizona felony conviction, civil rights are generally restored automatically after completion of probation or absolute discharge from imprisonment, provided any victim restitution has been paid.
Federal convictions are different. Arizona’s Elections Procedures Manual says a person with federal felony convictions may petition the Superior Court in the county where the person lives to have voting rights restored. People with multiple felony convictions may also have to use the court-restoration process rather than receiving automatic restoration.
That means the existence of a felony conviction alone does not answer the voter-registration question. The real question is: Has That Person’s Right To Vote Been Restored?
And that is precisely why accurate and timely conviction information matters…
A county recorder cannot simply remove every name appearing in a felony database. But A.R.S. § 16-165 does require the recorder to cancel a registration upon receiving qualifying notice of a felony conviction, subject to the statutory rules governing the conviction and later eligibility.
So, when federal felony records are missing, delayed, incomplete or difficult to match, county officials may be left without the information needed to identify which registrations require action.
That brings us directly back to the dispute between Heap and Fontes.
SO, WHAT EXACTLY DOES HEAP SAY WENT WRONG?
Heap’s complaint is not simply that felony records exist. It is that the federal felony information he says county recorders need to perform voter-list maintenance has not been reaching them in a complete and timely way.
In a September 24 statement, Heap said Maricopa County had not received an updated federal felony report from the Secretary of State since the second quarter of 2025. He said DOJ officials told him reports were available through the first quarter of 2026, and that after he contacted DOJ, the second-quarter 2026 report was sent to the Secretary of State that day. Those are Heap’s statements about what DOJ told him; I have not located a separate public DOJ document confirming that timeline.
Heap also says the problem is not merely timing. Arizona’s own Elections Procedures Manual says felony information received from the U.S. Department of Justice in non-electronic form is to be converted into the proper electronic format and imported into the statewide voter-registration system. The system then compares those records against voter registrations for potential hard and soft matches.
So, the dispute becomes fairly specific:
- Were the federal felony records received?
- Were they converted and imported as the EPM describes?
- And were county recorders given usable information from Fontes in time to investigate and resolve potential matches?
Fontes only disputes the significance of the problem. In comments reported by The Arizona Republic, he described the number of affected federal cases as “de minimis” and accused Heap of turning a technical issue into a political controversy.
And Republican Secretary of State candidate Alex Kolodin has now publicly joined that dispute, echoing Heap’s concerns about the federal felony data and voter-roll maintenance, and whether Fontes even sent the information, and if so, when.
But regardless of which political argument a reader finds more persuasive, the administrative question remains the same:
Did Arizona’s felony-record process work the way Arizona’s own Election Manual says it should?
SMALL NUMBER OR NOT — DOES THE PROCESS MATTER?
Fontes has argued that the number of federal felony cases involved is small. In comments reported by The Arizona Republic, he called it a “de minimis” number and emphasized that these are federal district-court convictions, not the much larger universe of Arizona Superior Court cases. That may be true about the size of the population.
But it answers a different question. The issue Heap has raised is not simply how many records are involved. It is whether the records that do exist were sent, received, processed and transmitted through Arizona’s voter-registration system as required.
Arizona law says county recorders shall cancel a registration upon receipt of qualifying notice of a felony conviction when the statutory requirements are met. Heap says Maricopa County had not received an updated federal felony report from the Secretary of State since the second quarter of 2025, and says DOJ officials told him more recent reports were available through Fontes.
So perhaps the better question is not: “How many people are we talking about?”
It is: “Did the process work?”
If the answer is yes, the records should tell us that. If the answer is no, then the size of the problem determines its scope — but not whether the procedure itself failed.
There is another distinction we cannot lose. A name appearing in a felony report does not automatically prove that person is presently ineligible to vote. Rights may have been restored. Records must be matched correctly. Potential duplicates must be investigated. And an active registration does not prove that an illegal ballot was cast.
Those safeguards protect eligible voters too. That is why accuracy has to work in both directions: remove registrations that legally should be removed, while making certain eligible citizens are not wrongly removed.
And that brings me back to where I started.
THIS IS WHY THE RECORDS MATTER
Heap says county recorders are prepared to perform their statutory responsibilities but need timely and usable information to do so. Fontes disputes Heap’s characterization of the problem, and has accused him of politicizing what Fontes describes as a technical issue; but Fontes has not produced documentation that he complied with the law.
Alex Kolodin, Fontes’s Republican opponent for Secretary of State, has also publicly taken up the issue, echoing Heap’s concerns about federal felony data and voter-roll maintenance.
Those political disagreements will continue. But the records would give us a much narrower question to answer.
- Did the federal felony information reach Arizona?
- Was it processed through the statewide system as Arizona’s own procedures contemplate?
- Did county recorders receive from Frontes the information necessary to determine which registrations required review or cancellation?
And perhaps most importantly: Can anyone in Arizona document the answer? Because voter-roll maintenance should not depend upon which elected official we believe.
THE RECORDS THEMSELVES SHOULD BE ABLE TO TELL US WHAT HAPPENED AND WHETHER FONTES WAS RESPONSIBLE.
By Linda Brickman
©2026 Linda Brickman. All Rights Reserved.
