Nearly 100,000 Arizona voters could be prohibited from voting in local elections this November

Arizona’s strict proof of citizenship requirements have put an estimated 100,000 Arizonans’ ability to vote in local elections at-risk, days before early ballots are scheduled to be mailed to voters.

As first reported by Votebeat, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office discovered that due to an error in the Motor Vehicle Division system, people who were issued a driver’s license and registered to vote within a certain time frame were incorrectly allowed to use their state ID as proof of citizenship.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer believes this group should only be allowed to vote in federal elections unless they provide proof of citizenship, and filed an emergency petition with the Arizona Supreme Court Tuesday to rule on the matter before ballots are mailed. If the court sides with Richer, affected voters will have until the voter registration deadline on October 7 to provide proof of citizenship.

Are you one of the voters affected?

If your driver’s license was issued before October 1996, and you requested a replacement license after October 1996, and you registered to vote after 2004, you might be one of the voters on the Secretary of State’s list.

Although there is currently no way to check if you are an affected voter, the largest proportion of the voters are between 45 and 60 years old and lean Republican, according to Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

Fontes said these voters should be able to cast a full ballot in November’s election, not just for federal races.

“This is a legal question only,” Fontes said in a press conference. “We are, however, taking legally different points of view so that we can have a rule of law in Arizona that we can abide by.”

For years, many of the nearly 100,000 voters had been erroneously allowed to vote in full-ballot elections because of a disconnect between Arizona’s MVD and local election officials, leading to the state marking these voters as having provided proof of citizenship when they had not, Fontes said.

“We have no reason to believe that there are any significant numbers of individuals remaining on this list who are not eligible to vote in Arizona, we cannot confirm that at this moment, but we don’t have any reason to believe that,” Fontes said.

Gov. Katie Hobbs said the administrative error has been fixed, and ordered the MVD to work with the SOS to develop a solution. She also announced plans for “an independent audit to ensure that MVD systems are functioning as necessary to support voter registration.”

“This flaw has existed since 2004. In every county. Across the state,” Richer said on X. “All of these people have attested under penalty of law that they are U.S. citizens…But they have NOT provided documented proof of citizenship.”

Why were these voters verified as citizens to begin with?

Since October 1996, Arizona residents have been required to provide proof of citizenship to get a regular driver’s license. Non-citizens, such as green card holders, are issued a different type of license. Before 1996, there was no such differentiation.

In 2004, Arizona voters approved a law requiring people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. Arizona is only one of a handful of states that require proof of citizenship, as noncitizens voting illegally is virtually nonexistent. Federal voter registration requires applicants swear under penalty of perjury that they are US citizens.

Since Arizona’s proof of citizenship requirement went into effect, if county election officials saw a license issuance date after October 1996, they knew that person had already provided the state with documented proof of citizenship.

The problem, however, was due to the MVD’s practice of changing issuance dates on replacement licenses, typically issued if someone needed to update the information on their ID, such as a change of address.

Meaning when someone with a replacement license registered to vote, election officials would see that it was issued after 1996 without the noncitizen designation and assume that the individual had already provided proof of citizenship to obtain the license, even if they hadn’t.

Arizona voters who cannot provide proof of citizenship can only vote in federal races, after a 2013 US Supreme Court ruling, with 41,000 “federal-only” voters currently on the books.

This means that the nearly 100,000 voters may cast ballots for the presidential and US Senate races, but not for the Legislature, county and local races, or ballot propositions.