Texas, Arizona Officials Release New Findings about Noncitizen Voters

Three new developments of relevance to Declare’s “Noncitizen Voting and Registration Tracker.”

First, the United States Supreme Court recently lifted a lower-court injunction against use of the federal government’s SAVE program.  

The Court’s ruling allows states to once again use the federal program to check the citizenship of registered voters. However, it limited its use, at least until after the November elections, to checks of individual voters. Under federal law, states are not allowed to “bulk upload” their entire voter lists this close to Election Day, as many did in the year following President Trump’s March 2025 executive order that expanded the SAVE program.  

Readers of Declare will know this is important because the SAVE program often serves as the starting point for citizenship audits of state voter rolls. The program is admittedly flawed, but it remains the only federal tool that can be used by election officials to quickly pull citizenship information from multiple federal databases. A federal district court judge had previously ruled that the SAVE program violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. The Supreme Court undid that ruling.

Second, Texas announced updated results of its citizenship audit. Previously (as reflected in Declare’s Tracker), Texas had loaded its approximately 18 million registered voters to the SAVE program. It returned 2,724 possible noncitizens out of the 18 million. Over the past months, county election officials have investigated the individual voter files. And in the end, the state referred 117 cases of potential noncitizen voting to the Texas Attorney General. Accordingly, Declare will revise the number on its Tracker from 2,724 out of 18 million down to 117.

Finally, In Arizona (my home state), the largest county, Maricopa County, uploaded voter information to the SAVE program, resulting in 137 alleged noncitizen registrants, including 60 with voting records. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office investigated the 60 files and announced at the end of September that 52 are actually citizens, but that 8 are noncitizens who had voted at least once in the past 16 years. Three of the 8 noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. Maricopa County has approximately 2.6 million registered voters, and approximately 2.1 million voters cast ballots in the county’s 2020 presidential election.

Keep checking back with Declare for updates on noncitizen voter audits.