Mayes, Fontes say the Trump administration may be breaking the law to scour Arizona voter data

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes sent a letter warning that a federal effort to identify noncitizen voters using state voter registration data may violate both the Privacy Act of 1974 and Arizona law, which makes it a felony to share voters' private information outside authorized purposes. The concern traces to an FBI subpoena of Arizona Senate election-audit records that included Maricopa County's voter database, and to a Schumer-Padilla whistleblower report describing USCIS staff cross-checking state voter rolls for so-called unlawful voters.

Mayes noted that verifying a voter's identity in Arizona's systems requires inputting exactly the sensitive data the law is meant to protect, meaning the search itself may be the violation. She cited a prior court ruling limiting DHS's use of such data for this purpose, but that ground shifted Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal government's right to run a similar citizenship-status verification database nationwide.

Nationwide reviews under related noncitizen-voting initiatives have produced 160 arrests out of 211 million registered voters, a figure far below the hundreds of thousands of supposed noncitizen voters the administration and DHS have previously floated. Mayes' office says it is still reviewing what the Supreme Court's ruling means for the specific USCIS conduct described in the whistleblower account.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.