FACT CHECK: Heap Referral and Mitchell Investigation and Kolodin Claims Fontes was convicted of lying???
FALSE CLAIM: Kolodin criticized the Secretary over Heap's referral and Fontes' claims that it was politically motivated. Back in February, Republican Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap handed over a list of 207 suspected non-citizen registered voters to County Attorney Rachel Mitchell. Heap said 60 of the non-citizens had cast a ballot. Kolodin and election deniers have seized on this, suggesting that there must be non-citizens voting.
FACT: By law, County Attorney Rachel Mitchell was required to investigate what could be a felony offense in Arizona—voting when a person isn’t eligible to vote. On Monday, Mitchell released the results of her office’s investigation: 52 of the 60 “non-citizens” were actually American citizens. The eight non-citizens had cast a ballot at least once over several years. (All eight are in the country legally, according to Mitchell.) Mitchell and Attorney General Kris Mayes are investigating the remaining 140 “non-citizens.”
“What we have found so far obviously is not adequate to swing an election,” Mitchell said at a news conference. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes criticized the SAVE database Heap relied on.
“This is an example of the bad data that the SAVE system has,” Fontes said in an interview. There were dozens and dozens of folks who were flagged as potential non-citizens, and none of it was really the case except for a few.” .
Kolodin also threw into his answer that Fontes was convicted of lying. That is false.
Comments