Can Arizona force voters to prove their citizenship? It’s complicated
A U.S. Supreme Court case being used to criticize a new Arizona voter registration law doesn’t say what critics claim, columnist Robert Robb says.
Arizona Republic
The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office will launch an internal investigation into a recent citizenship tracking glitch as it searches for ways to narrow down the list of impacted voters.
In an update on the coding error, state election officials said they are commissioning a search of office records to unravel the situation and determine “the extent to which the issue was known and for how long, what steps were or were not taken to correct the problem, and how the office, moving forward, can help assure that something like this never happens again.”
Officials said they had also sent records for some — but not all — impacted voters to county recorders across the state. They are continuing to determine the next steps for affected voters and said they are engaging with state agencies that may be able to help compress the list of impacted Arizonans.
The update comes days after officials announced that more people than initially reported were affected by the error, which was discovered in September. The news brought the total number of impacted voters to around 218,000.
Those voters lean older, and most are longtime Arizonans. They swore under the penalty of criminal charges that they were U.S. citizens upon registering to vote, and many have been on the voter rolls for years.
But election officials cannot determine with absolute certainty whether those in the group handed over citizenship documents — and state law dictates those who haven’t proved citizenship cannot vote in state and local races. Nonetheless, voters impacted by the glitch have historically been eligible to vote a full ballot.
Officials have repeatedly said they believe the impacted voters are citizens. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that noncitizen voting is rare. Noncitizens who attempt to vote risk fines and prison time. They also could risk deportation if they are in the country illegally or impeding their naturalization process if they are applying for citizenship.
Impacted voters will again receive a full ballot in the upcoming election following a quick decision by the state’s highest court on Sept. 20. But they will be required to prove their citizenship before voting in future state and local races. That means county recorders statewide will have to come up with the next steps for the group once the November general election is over.
The Secretary of State’s Office said it would “soon be able to accurately communicate with affected voters and provide clear next steps to resolve any issues.” Officials said they would “provide regular communication to all relevant parties, including the public, over the coming days and months to finally bring all our systems in compliance with the law.”
Why did the number of impacted voters grow?
The citizenship tracking glitch was caused by the way the state’s Motor Vehicle Division provided information to its voter registration database.
Arizonans have been required to provide citizenship documents to obtain a driver’s license since 1996. Years later, voters approved a ballot measure that mandated new voters prove their citizenship to participate in state and local races. When a person signs up to vote, election officials check motor vehicle records to see if they have already satisfied the proof of citizenship requirement.
However, the Motor Vehicle Division coded its database in a way that could change the issuance date of an Arizonan’s license and indicate they had proved citizenship even if they may not have. That means someone could have gotten a driver’s license before 1996 without proving their citizenship, received a duplicate one that updated the license issuance date, and then were incorrectly registered to vote a full ballot.
The error allowed a group of voters to slip through the cracks. Officials initially estimated the size of the group at around 98,000 voters. On Monday, they revised the number up to 218,000.
Officials said Thursday that the new number resulted from a change in search parameters. Initially, Motor Vehicle Division officials had only included people who had possessed a license before 1996 and either never updated it or later received a duplicate license while searching their database to compile the list of potentially affected Arizonans.
The second database search used broader parameters that included people who had similarly held a license before 1996 but later received a renewed or reinstated license. In doing so, the search identified more impacted voters.
“The datasets now include all active records that have a pre-Oct. 1, 1996 driver’s license or ID credential and have not subsequently received a REAL ID or other ID that would have required authorized presence,” said Bill Lamoreaux, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Transportation.
Officials search for ways to narrow list of affected voters
State officials said they are continuing to work with various state and federal agencies to winnow down the number of impacted voters.
County recorders previously said they likely wouldn’t have time to perform additional checks on all voters caught in the coding error in the narrowing window before the November election. The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to allow affected voters to receive a full ballot for the upcoming election bought them time. However, recorders across the state will still have to verify citizenship for a newly widened pool of impacted Arizonans before future elections.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, has for weeks been searching for ways to reduce the burden of resolving affected voters’ eligibility. He and his staff previously said they hoped to use federal tools to perform additional citizenship checks on voters caught in the coding error.
Officials said Thursday that they had asked the state Department of Health Services to provide copies of birth certificates for all potentially affected voters born in Arizona. An American birth certificate serves as a citizenship document.
State election officials also sent records for some impacted voters to county recorders. The records transmitted to local election officials were only for voters in the initial group of impacted Arizonans and only for those whose records include specific identification numbers provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Those identifiers can be inputted into a federal database to verify immigration and citizenship status for certain voters.
Meanwhile, legal troubles hit
So far, state election officials haven’t provided county recorders with a full list of impacted voters — but a conservative group is suing for it.
America First Legal, a law firm aligned with former President Donald Trump, filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that the Secretary of State’s Office was “stonewalling” and had “unlawfully refused” to fulfill a public records request submitted by the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona.
Their suit accuses state election officials of “insulating themselves from embarrassment” rather than “following the law.”
The filing echoes unfounded claims of noncitizen voting. It is one of several lawsuits that America First Legal has pursued in Arizona regarding those baseless allegations. In another case, the legal group and the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona sought to force local officials to take extra steps to verify the citizenship status of certain limited-ballot voters.
Those voters, known as “federal-only” voters, haven’t provided documentary proof of citizenship and thus cannot vote in state and local races. They have attested to their citizenship and can still vote in federal contests, including the presidential race and congressional matchups.
The legal group and the foundation also weighed in on the Arizona Supreme Court case that considered whether voters impacted by the coding glitch should be able to vote a full ballot in November. They argued that any ballots returned by the affected voters should be sequestered until election officials had verified each voter’s citizenship.
In a response to the foundation’s initial public records request, an attorney representing the Secretary of State’s Office noted the groups’ prior legal activity.
“We fear, especially based on SCF’s filings, that its true desire here is not to keep watch on government actions — which our public records laws are designed to facilitate — but instead harass and intimidate voters in the midst of an election,” wrote attorney Craig Morgan of Sherman & Howard LLC.
He cited an exemption under state public records law known as “best interest of the state,” as well as personal privacy exemptions. He said the “need to provide carefully vetted and correct information” outweighed “the public’s desire for general access to public records.”
“This is especially so, when the information sought is imperfect, potentially unreliable, undergoing rigorous evaluation and investigation, and if distributed haphazardly, could lead to chaos, confusion, harassment, and create an overwhelming administrative burden on an office with limited resources during a time when those resources are already needed to carry out core administrative functions,” Morgan wrote.
Investigation comes amid questions from officials
Questions remain over why the citizenship tracking issue wasn’t caught for years.
The problem spanned numerous administrations in the Governor’s Office, Secretary of State’s Office, and recorder offices across the state. Both Republicans and Democrats have held those positions in the two decades since Arizona first began requiring citizenship documents from new voters.
“There is no way that nobody — over 20 years and 15 counties — previously discovered this,” Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, said on social media earlier this week. “Why wasn’t it addressed before?”
Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, previously said she would commission “an independent audit to ensure that MVD systems are functioning as necessary to support voter registration.”
The internal probe in the Secretary of State’s Office will be separate from that review.
“We’re doing our due diligence to ensure we understand the system that was put in place and that the system is still relevant today, based on laws that have changed, upgrades that have been made to systems, and everything in between,” said Aaron Thacker, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office.
Sasha Hupka covers county government and election administration for The Arizona Republic. Reach her at [email protected]. Follow her on X: @SashaHupka. Follow her on Instagram or Threads: @sashahupkasnaps. Sign up for her weekly election newsletter, Republic Recount.
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Publish date : 2024-10-04 04:44:00
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