Neil DeSanti, GOP candidate who pushed election fraud claims, indicted for voting illegally

Perennial Republican candidate Neil DeSanti was indicted earlier this month for falsely registering to vote and illegally voting, both felonies, because he never had his right to vote restored after pleading guilty to multiple felonies in 2010.

DeSanti currently serves as a Republican precinct committeeman in his north Phoenix legislative district, a post that is restricted to legally registered voters.

In 2024, while DeSanti was running for the Arizona House of Representatives, the Arizona Mirror exclusively reported that DeSanti had never had his rights restored following those 2010 felonies. While Arizona law says that people with only one felony will automatically have their rights restored once their sentence is completed and any required restitution is paid, people like DeSanti who have two or more felonies must petition the court to get their rights restored.

DeSanti didn’t apply to get his rights restored until three days after the Mirror’s report — the same day that he filed his nominating petitions for the 2024 election. DeSanti dropped that bid for office after a fellow Republican in DeSanti’s district challenged his eligibility to be a candidate because he was not legally registered to vote.

The court rejected DeSanti’s bid to restore his civil rights. 

Although Maricopa County Superior Court Commissioner Christina Henderson restored DeSanti’s rights in relation to a 2004 drunk driving case, in which he pleaded guilty to felony endangerment, she denied his identical request in a case where DeSanti pleaded guilty to felony possession of burglary tools after he and his cousin were caught stealing a metal ramp from a commercial yard near downtown Phoenix.

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office urged the court to deny DeSanti’s request to have his rights restored. Henderson wrote that she denied the petition because that crime had a victim and occurred while he was on release in the drunk driving case. 

“Denial is in (the) best interest of public safety,” Henderson wrote on July 23, 2024. 

When Arizonans register to vote, they swear that the information they provide is correct, and failure to do so can result in a felony charge for false voter registration. When he registered to vote in 2012, and then in multiple subsequent voter registration updates, DeSanti declared that he is “NOT a convicted FELON or my civil rights are restored.” That was not true.

A grand jury empaneled by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office indicted DeSanti on four felony counts of false voter registration — one for the first time he registered in 2012 and three for registration updates in 2018, 2020 and 2021 — and two felony counts of illegal voting, related to the ballots he cast in November 2024 and November 2025. The indictment was handed down on July 13.

Although DeSanti voted regularly following his initial registration, prosecutors only charged him with voting in the 2024 presidential election and a local election in 2025. It’s unclear why those are the only elections that led to criminal charges, since the statute of limitations for those crimes is seven years.

The false registration counts are class 6 felonies, while the illegal voting charges are class 5 felonies. The standard prison sentence for a class 6 felony is one year, and one-and-a-half years for a class 5 felony.

However, given DeSanti’s past felonies, a judge could sentence him to a longer prison term if he’s convicted.

DeSanti did not respond to requests for comment. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.

DeSanti told the Mirror two years ago that he believed he was legally registered, but that won’t be much of a defense in court if he is criminally charged. In 2024, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of Kyle Anthony Clark, who was indicted for false registration and illegal voting in 2021, and concluded that prosecutors do not need to prove that a person knew they were voting illegally, just that they were ineligible to vote and did so anyway.

Since 2021, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office has prosecuted at least six people with prior felony convictions for registering to vote and casting ballots without first having their rights restored. 

For instance, Kenneth Russell Nelson registered to vote in 2018 and cast ballots in the 2018 primary and general elections, then again in the 2020 general election. But he had never had his rights restored following a 2007 drunk driving felony. Nelson was indicted for four felonies: one count of false registration and three counts of illegal voting. He pleaded guilty to attempted illegal voting.

Likewise, a San Tan Valley man named Roberto Garcia pleaded guilty to illegally voting in 2020 because he registered to vote and cast a ballot without having his rights restored.

A frequent candidate

DeSanti has routinely sought elected office since 2020, when he mounted a campaign for the Corporation Commission. But he failed to qualify for the ballot, so he shifted his sights to Phoenix mayor; he never submitted signatures to appear on the ballot.

In 2022, DeSanti hoped to be elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in District 2, which includes large portions of north Phoenix. He turned in nominating petitions, but was removed from the ballot after their validity was challenged in court and he fell short of the required number of valid petition signatures. 

His campaigns for the state House in 2024 and 2026 both ended the same way.

DeSanti, a loyal Donald Trump supporter, has used his social media profiles to decry the “election fraud” that he says led to Trump’s 2020 defeat by Joe Biden. 

“We the people, stormed the Arizona State Capital to show the evidence collected from The Voter registration list and elsewhere that dead People, nonresidential votes and illegal immigrants Votes where (sic) counted and shouldn’t! #ArizonaFirst #AuditTheVote #desantiforaz,” he wrote on Twitter on Dec. 31, 2020, in a post that is now private.

He also has praised the work of We the People AZ Alliance, an election denial group at the center of many of the election fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona. In the spring and summer of 2021, as the Arizona Senate was conducting a partisan “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County — an effort that was spurred on by Trump’s campaign in its quixotic pursuit of evidence of election fraud — DeSanti regularly took to social media to tout the latest news. 

He frequently posted videos from right-wing conspiracy theorists, including Liz Harris, who would go on to be elected to the Arizona Legislature in 2022 — and then expelled in 2023 after she lied to ethics investigators about the role she played in encouraging testimony baselessly accusing state officials and her fellow lawmakers of crimes.

After the 2022 election, DeSanti wrote on Facebook that Election Day problems with ballot printers and tabulators at voting centers in Maricopa County were “undeniable evidence that tampering accrued (sic) with this election by the McCain & Democrat collaborators.”