  In high-energy heavy-ion collisions, the chiral magnetic effect (CME) is
predicted to arise from the interplay between the chirality imbalance of quarks
in the nuclear medium and the intense magnetic field, and will cause a charge
separation along the magnetic field direction. While the search for the CME is
still ongoing in experiments at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the CME-sensitive observables need to be
scrutinized to exclude the non-CME contributions. In this work, we examine the
influence of globally spin-aligned $\rho$ mesons on the $\gamma_{112}$
correlator, the $R_{\Psi_2}(\Delta S)$ correlator, and the signed balance
functions, via a toy model and a multiphase transport model (AMPT). The global
spin alignment of vector mesons could originate from non-CME mechanisms in
heavy-ion collisions, and is characterized by the 00-component of the spin
density matrix, $\rho_{00}$. We find that the CME observables show similar
dependence on $\rho_{00}$, and could receive a positive (negative) contribution
from $\rho$-decay pions, if the $\rho_{00}$ of $\rho$ mesons is larger
(smaller) than 1/3. Since pions are the most abundant particles in such
collisions, the $\rho_{00}$ measurements for $\rho$ mesons become crucial to
the interpretation of the CME data.
