Morgan Fischer
Audio By Carbonatix
Earlier this week, word spread that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem would be heading to Phoenix on Friday for a big elections-related announcement. Some local election staffers felt chills, worried that Noem was there to confiscate ballots, much like the FBI had recently done in Fulton County, Georgia.
Instead, after shuttling media members to a secret location that wound up being the Homeland Security Investigations office in Scottsdale, Noem’s press conference amounted to little more than a puffed-up publicity stunt for a voting bill making its way through Congress. In the process, though, Noem spouted a bunch of disprovable bullshit about Arizona’s elections.
Noem focused her comments on urging the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, which the House of Representatives passed earlier this week. Senate Democrats and several Republicans have strongly opposed the bill, providing it with little or no path to 60 votes to defeat a filibuster.
The bill would require voters to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote at in-person local election offices and to show photo ID when casting a ballot. It would also prohibit universal mail-in voting and require voters to submit a copy of an eligible ID through the mail when requesting and casting an absentee ballot.
The only problem? Arizona already does most of that. The state requires proof of citizenship when registering for state and local elections, and is in fact one of the few states to do so. (Federal courts have struck down that requirement when registering to vote in federal races.) Arizona also requires voters to show ID when voting in-person at polling places. And while the vast majority of voters in the state opt for mail-in voting, that practice is not universal.
That irony got the attention of Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who has battled the federal government’s efforts to encroach upon the state’s election administration.
“Maybe your staff is terrible. Maybe they briefed you wrong,” said Fontes, addressing Noem in a video statement posted to social media. “We already have documented proof of citizens at registration for Arizona’s voters. We’ve been doing that for 20 years. Maybe not in the Dakotas, where you came from.”
All that made Arizona an odd place for Noem to prattle on about election integrity. Then again, though, the state has been an easy target for election conspiracy theorists — many of whom are now in the White House — to push the “Big Lie” about unfounded claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 election, or really any contest that doesn’t go their way.
A who’s-who of conspiracy theorists and Trump loyalists of the state stood off to the side of Noem as she reheated baseless claims about voter fraud and criticized Arizona for having the worst elections in the nation. Among them were embattled MAGA Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, openly Islamophobic state Rep. John Gillette, conservative attorney Jennifer Wright and GOP Reps. Paul Gosar and Eli Crane.
Notably, Heap stood by as Noem said the state’s voter rolls, maintained by the state’s county recorders, need to be cleaned up. That prompted Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin — a centrist Republican who, along with his supervisor colleagues, is locked in a heated dispute with Heap over election administration — to crack a joke at Heap’s expense.
“I didn’t watch the press conference,” Galvin said in a text to Phoenix New Times, “but based on the comments you just told me, the DHS secretary bashed Justin Heap for doing a bad job.”
To former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer — a centrist Republican who battled an onslaught of election conspiracists before Heap beat him in the 2024 GOP primary — the press conference was a “nothingburger,” just an “infomercial for the SAVE Act” and a “suboptimal use of time.”
Here are some other grade-A bullshit statements Noem made at the press conference, and the actual truth about them.
“We’ll no longer allow American citizens to be disenfranchised, to have their voices suppressed by criminals, by hostile, foreign actors and illegal aliens.”
Noem claimed citizens were being disenfranchised due to rampant noncitizen voting, which muddies the waters by lowering the individual weight of a citizen’s vote. This would suggest that there are enough felons and undocumented immigrants illegally voting that election outcomes are being swayed. But that’s simply not the case.
Richer said he came across “one or two” instances of felons and noncitizens voting during his four years as recorder. But that’s out of 2.6 million registrants, so those handful of votes didn’t swing an election. “There is no significant number of non-citizens voting currently in the United States,” Richer said.
He added that those cases weren’t election-specific and that all of instances of potentially fraudulent voter registrations were referred to the Arizona Attorney General or the Maricopa County Attorney and were taken seriously.
In a statement issued after the presser, Heap claimed to have identified 60 noncitizens who previously voted in Maricopa County elections. Though that was out of more than 61,000 voters affected by a Motor Vehicles Division bug that incorrectly listed certain voters as having provided proof of citizenship. Those 60 noncitizen voters — if Heap’s claim is actually true — would represent only 0.002% of voters in the county.
“Multiple investigations, independent audits, and courts across this country have all reached the same conclusion: voter fraud is exceedingly rare and has not played a meaningful role in the outcome of an election,” Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes wrote in a statement after the presser.
“Each of the arguments that have been laid out to criticize this bill are baseless speculation from the radical left because they want illegal aliens to vote in our elections.”
The SAVE Act has been criticized by Democrats and some Republicans for aiming to disenfranchise voters over the exceedingly rare issue of noncitizen voting. As written, it could disenfranchise married women, whose last names on documentation often don’t match, overseas service members and more. Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, who has said he won’t vote in favor of the SAVE Act, said in a statement that “we must make sure it does not limit the ability for citizens to exercise their right to vote.”
Many rural Americans would need to obtain a passport, a certified copy of their birth certificate or other ID to show proof of citizenship, and then travel long distances to local election officers to register. That would be especially difficult for many Native American voters, who often lack access to that documentation in the first place.
“Americans should not have to pay extra money or drive 4 to 5 hours away to make their voices heard,” Gallego wrote. “Many Arizonans do not want the hassle of sending in a photocopy of their ID with each mail-in ballot.”
Richer said he supports the SAVE Act “in broad strokes” when it comes to voter ID and proof of citizenship. But he doesn’t support a ban on mail-in voting and finds it hypocritical for anyone in the Trump administration to suggest others are lying about election administration.
“Lying about election administration is at the heart of this administration — is at the very heart of Trumpism — and was seemingly a qualifying belief to be a Trump cabinet member or be a part of Trump’s inner circle,” Richer said.
“I’m sure there are many of (examples of election fraud in Arizona).”
Richer said there’s no evidence of this in Arizona and called Noem’s statement “irresponsible” for not giving a single example. The best Noem could muster were general examples of people living in mobile homes or on lakes voting despite not living in Arizona.
“This reminds me of what Rudy Giuliani said to Rusty Bowers in the aftermath of the 2020 election: We have a lot of theories, but we don’t have facts,” Richer said.
In his video, Fontes gave some numbers that Noem couldn’t muster up. Through the use of the Electronic Registration Information Center system, more than 300 cases of possible voter fraud were referred to his office, he said. Each case was investigated, but only 28 were referred to the Attorney General for prosecution, the majority of which pertained to voters who voted in both Arizona and another state. One case was a person who double-voted in Arizona and one other involved the potential use of a deceased person’s registration to vote.
“You’re coming into Arizona, Secretary Noem, and telling me, the Secretary of State, to do a job that I’m already doing,” Fontes said. “Don’t come into Arizona there from Washington, D.C., and tell us how to run our elections. We’re doing just fine without you, thank you very much.”
“Your state has been an absolute disaster on elections. Your leaders have failed you dramatically by not having systems that work, by disenfranchising Americans who wanted to vote, they had to stand in lines for hours because machines failed or software failed.”
Richer dismissed this claim, comparing it to when a band on tour tells every city that it’s their favorite because it “gets the emotions going.” Election denialism is also “central to the identity of the MAGA elite,” he added. “You don’t go to any state and say that their elections are great.”
Unless, of course, Trump won all three primary and general elections.
To be clear, there has been no evidence of voter fraud in Arizona on the scale required to swing elections. Abe Hamadeh couldn’t prove it in court when he lost to Mayes by 280 votes in 2022, and Kari Lake came up short in court — over and over and over — trying to litigate her loss to Gov. Katie Hobbs that same year. Even the notorious Cyber Ninjas audit of the 2020 election found Joe Biden won the state.
There have been sporadic hiccups in certain counties and certain elections, but those are both inevitable and not widespread enough to disenfranchise people en masse. Meanwhile, there’s evidence that Heap’s office may have disenfranchised some voters by overzealously rejecting ballot signatures in last year’s off-year, all-mail election.
The only thing that’s changed recently about elections in Arizona is that Democrats started winning them.
