Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is moving forward with allowing about 218,000 registered voters to participate in the 2024 election despite lingering questions about their citizenship.
The conservative group America First Legal sued to receive a list of the voters by Monday, while a Republican state lawmaker demanded the list in a letter. Fontes, an elected Democrat, resisted those calls, and now an Arizona court will hear arguments over Fontes’s decision to withhold the list on Oct. 15.
The revelation that hundreds of thousands of registered voters were not properly documented in a key border and battleground state came about after election officials initially discovered that 98,000 Arizonans who had received driver’s licenses before the fall of 1996 were registered to vote but may not have provided the state Department of Transportation with their citizenship status. Election officials use the transportation records to cross-check their voter rolls.
Fontes then revealed last week that the number had at least doubled, calling the discovery an “evolving situation” but emphasizing that the law and court precedent support all of the registrants being able to vote in Arizona’s federal, state, and local elections in 2024.
Fontes said all of the registrants had confirmed under penalty of perjury that they were citizens when they registered to vote but that the state Department of Transportation does not necessarily have their documented proof of citizenship, which Arizona state law requires of voters to participate in state and local elections.
The vast majority are likely citizens, according to Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Gina Swoboda, who noted they all had been living in the state since at least the 1990s with licenses. But Swoboda worries the situation will hurt voter confidence and turnout “if people think it’s a big mess.”
“I’m desperately trying to make sure that anything that happens is not something that hurts confidence or hurts these voters,” Swoboda told the Washington Examiner.
She called the situation “delicate,” noting that removing swathes of voters from voter rolls within 90 days of an election is a violation of the National Voter Registration Act and would be subject to a federal lawsuit.
“I think this is a super delicate situation, and it’s going to require exactly the right approach,” Swoboda said. “What are you going to do? You can’t deprive these people of your ballot. You just can’t. It’s the 14th Amendment.”
State officials are working rapidly to correct the glitch and verify citizenship, Fontes said in an update on Thursday. He noted the Arizona Supreme Court also recently ruled that the 98,000 must be allowed to vote on a full ballot in November and that the decision would continue to apply even though the number of registrants in question is larger now.
It is illegal for noncitizens to vote, and while Fontes and Swoboda are both projecting confidence that nearly all of the 218,000 registrants are citizens, the problem was initially uncovered because an election official in Maricopa County discovered one of them was a noncitizen, according to court papers.
President Joe Biden won Maricopa, a populous, purple county, by about a 2% margin, or 45,000 votes, in 2020. The county faced several lawsuits at the time, alleging problems with the ink used on ballots, signature verification on ballots, how votes were tabulated, and other concerns. All the lawsuits were eventually tossed out.
Now, in the lead-up to what is expected to be another hotly contested race, Maricopa County is at the center of controversy, though the voter registrants in question are located not just in Maricopa but across the state.
Arizona state Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who criticized Fontes for the discrepancy and demanded the voter registration list, shared on X Fontes’s response in which the secretary of state refused to disclose the list.
“Nothing to see here!” Kolodin said.
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America First Legal attorneys said their demand for the list was intended to build confidence in Arizona’s election process and noted that statewide voter registration lists are required to be publicly accessible.
“This lawsuit seeks to restore public trust in our State’s electoral system by ensuring transparency about the Defendants’ failures to ensure that registered voters have provided [documented proof of citizenship], as required by law,” the attorneys wrote.
