Hey, Arizona!

In recent months, you may have heard about a federal system called SAVE — and you may not have a great impression of it.

The system was originally built to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. Then, President Donald Trump’s administration transformed it into a mass voter verification tool. Since then, it's made headlines for falsely flagging eligible voters as noncitizens.

But what if SAVE could still be useful?

Yavapai County Recorder Michelle Burchill was intrigued when she first learned about the tool.

She has helped run elections in the bright-red county for about six years. Burchill, a Republican, entered the field as an elections skeptic. Over time, she has gained trust in election systems. Still, she wanted to confidently tell her voters that her county’s roll was free of any noncitizens. 

So, earlier this year, she began running her county’s voter list through the expanded system.

Burchill saw false positives. But she said the system ultimately helped her confirm the citizenship status of hundreds of voters who hadn’t submitted a birth certificate, passport, or other documents required by state law to vote a full ballot, as well as thousands of voters caught up in a state coding error discovered in 2024. That expanded access to the ballot.

She also found the tool useful for identifying voters who had died and needed to be removed from the rolls, as well as vulnerabilities in the state’s aging voter registration system.

In the process, she found 30 noncitizens on her voter list — about 0.01% of her county’s total voters. She reached that number only after using other methods and databases to double-check the citizenship status of voters that SAVE initially flagged as ineligible.

It makes her county among the first jurisdictions in the country to demonstrate the system’s potential — and stands in stark contrast to others that have used the tool.

Take Maricopa County as an example. The state’s most populous county has also used SAVE. There, Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, said his office had identified 137 potential noncitizens registered to vote while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of voters impacted by the state’s coding error.

But Heap didn’t answer questions about whether he vetted SAVE’s results. Later, he sent information about 207 voters to local and state prosecutors. That’s significantly more than the 137 voters that he had previously said he suspected were noncitizens, but he didn’t respond to questions about where the additional voters came from.

Around the same time, Heap said that he intended to change the registration status of the voters. Several lawyers told Votebeat that the way he planned to do so was incorrect.

Burchill wrote a multi-page report on her experience using SAVE, which could serve as a model for other jurisdictions seeking to use the tool responsibly. She said she believes the tool, while flawed, can build trust and confidence in elections, provided that its data is vetted carefully.

“The SAVE database is not the only useful tool on which we should rely for voter registration purposes,” Burchill wrote, “but in my view, it has been by far the most valuable.”

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