A review of how some noncitizens were allowed to register to vote in Arizona confirms an ABC15 Investigators report that uncovered incompatibilities between state laws for obtaining driver licenses and registering to vote.
Arizona is the only state in the nation to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. About 218,000 voters may not have provided proof due to systemic database issues stretching back 20 years. The problems became public in September, shortly before the 2024 election.
Gov. Katie Hobbs on Friday released a bipartisan audit she ordered in the fall after the issues came to light. It recommends closer coordination between the Motor Vehicle Division, which issues driver licenses, and the Secretary of State’s Office, which maintains voter rolls, as well as county recorders.
“Finding regular time to share information and build relationships between the MVD and election officials will help eliminate issues in the future,” the report states.
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The MVD and voter roll systems have been reprogrammed, but the audit also notes that state law could still allow some U.S. nationals who are not citizens to register to vote. Arizona law accepts passports as proof of citizenship, but passports are issued to some people who are not citizens, such as U.S. nationals from American Samoa and Swains Island.
The MVD does not know how many people this could affect but believes the number is very small, according to the audit.
Audit cites ABC15 reporting from 2016 on noncitizen who registered to vote
The audit details how the problems affecting Arizona's voter rolls persisted for decades and confirms ABC15 reporting that the database issues could have been identified and fixed years ago.
In September, then-Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced they had found a data coding error in Arizona’s driver's license database that allowed at least one non-citizen to register to vote.
Initial estimates found the data errors affected about 218,000 people, 5% of all Arizona voters, who may not have provided documentary proof of citizenship to register as required by Proposition 200, which became law in 2004. These voters were initially issued a driver's license prior to 1996, before state law required proof of citizenship for licenses.
In October 2016, ABC15 reported on how a non-citizen was able to register to vote in Maricopa County. At the time, Alan Faygenblat described his actions as an attempt to see “if the system really worked” in preventing voter fraud.
“I didn’t want to get in trouble,” he told ABC15 then.
Faygenblat was criminally charged with false voter registration and pleaded guilty in 2017.
According to court records, Faygenblat was an Israeli citizen who was legally in the United States, but he falsely checked a box saying he was a citizen on the Service Arizona website. He received a voter registration card in the mail.
The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in 2016 described his registration as a loophole.
“Any person who got a driver's license after 1996 had to prove citizenship to the MVD. (The individual) had gotten a driver's license in 1994 so he did not need to prove citizenship. However, for some reason after 1996, he had to get a new license reissued to him and he was never scanned for citizenship at that point,” a recorder’s spokesperson had told ABC15.
Then-Recorder Helen Purcell dismissed the idea this could lead to widespread fraud.
“I think we check it thoroughly enough that’s not the case,” she told ABC15.
Neither the secretary of state nor other election officials asked for changes after the ABC15 story, the audit says.
The same loophole was again discovered in 2024 – eight years later – with a new noncitizen who registered to vote in Maricopa County.
According to an internal report from December, Secretary of State’s Office staffers also discovered the miscoding in two separate instances in 2017 and 2020.
Hobbs, who was secretary of state in 2020, sent current Secretary of State Adrian Fontes a letter critical of that report's findings, saying the review appeared to be focused on finding someone to blame.
The governor in her letter indicated that the Maricopa County Recorder's Office, which Fontes headed in 2020, had been made aware of the incident.
The voters affected by the miscoding were allowed to cast a full ballot in November. But county recorders still need to contact those voters for proper documentation of citizenship before the next election.
State and county elections officials also need to decide what to do about a list of approximately 7,000 voters who have an inactive MVD record, according to the governor-ordered audit.
