Arizona is becoming a victim of its own voter registration problem after the Secretary of State’s office reported this week that 120,000 more voter registrations were incorrectly validated because they were not checked for citizenship. That means a total of 218,000 voters were affected by a Motor Vehicle Department (MVD) computer error that allowed people who received driver’s licenses before 1996 to vote before they proved they were US citizens. The problem dates back two decades.
This discovery happened only weeks prior to the election, on 23 October, raising concerns about the election and its transparency. The Secretary of State’s office confirmed that the discovery was made earlier this month. Yet critics have highlighted how the problem was not immediately publicized. The Arizona GOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda has accused the Secretary of State Adrian Fontes of dragging his feet and misleading the people.
The mistake was ‘tagging’ voters in Arizona’s voter registration database as possessing Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) when in fact the people in question acquired their driver’s license before this requirement, instituted in the year 1996, was instituted. Despite having obsolete driver’s licenses, they’d been ‘tagged’ as having met Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement for more than a decade. This was enacted in Prop 200 in Arizona, which requires ‘verifiable proof of United States citizenship’ for a person to vote in any ‘state or local election’.
Meanwhile of State’s office issued a press statement saying that it would fix the problem, and calling the revelations ‘the latest news in an ongoing crisis’. Its statement said: Those voters will remain eligible to vote a full ballot – including in local and state races – while election officials work to correct our faulty classification of these voters. Adrian Fontes, the secretary of state, explained: ‘We can’t risk deterring voters, and we can’t risk denying actual citizens the right to vote, based on an error they didn’t control.
Political Fallout and Accusations of a Cover-Up
Arizona’s Republican Party has strongly criticized the Secretary of State over the handling of the issue. In a statement, it accused Fontes of ‘offering no detail about the cause of the error’ and of ‘dragging his feet’ on the release of the true magnitude of the problem. It also demanded ‘immediate access’ to the lists of affected voters by the 15 county recorders, stating that the ‘inability of the Secretary of State’s office to communicate this information in a timely manner continues to undermine public confidence in the integrity of our elections in Arizona’.
Furthermore, a leaked phone call between Arizona’s governor Katie Hobbs, attorney general Kris Mayes and secretary of state Adrian Fontes seemed to suggest that the governor and the attorney general were aware of the error and that the two top officials believed the discovery could lead to calls for new elections in 2020 and 2022, according to The New York Times. The leaked phone call from January 2023 indicated that the officials had been aware of the citizenship verification problem before the issue became public, and discussed how to handle the political fallout.
During a call, Mayes said any election in Arizona over the past 20 years could be successfully challenged based on the glitch; days later, the new governor, Katie Hobbs, told the same legislators the issue of missing citizenship verification would ‘validate establishment of a prima facie case that those individuals are not US citizens eligible to vote’. She added: ‘And we know what happens when a prima facie case is established – people want new general elections.
Legal and Legislative Implications
The error has raised questions about whether the misclassified elections can be challenged in court, particularly given that the error dates back to the 1990s. Under Arizona law, voters without an approved DPOC are allowed to vote only in federal elections. But the misclassification allowed many of them to vote in state and local races as well.
Many have pointed to the loopholes in Arizona’s voter registration laws – an issue that has been hotly debated by proponents of tougher election laws – and used the latest revelations to argue forer verification, so as.
In the interim, the Secretary of State’s office said they would work with the Motor Vehicle Department to correct the voter rolls. Officials also promised to reach out to the affected voters after the general election to make sure they’d get their documentation in order. But for many voters and election officials, the damage to public confidence has already been done.
Calls for Accountability
The revelation of the registration glitch has triggered bipartisan concerns about voting integrity in Arizona, even if affected voters were more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. The Arizona GOP is demanding that Fontes ‘immediately report the number of affected registrations of both parties to the Secretary of State and the State Legislature, as well as a detailed analysis of how the problem happened and how it will be fixed.’
This voter registration crisis unfolds as the state prepares for another heated election, and when trust in the electoral process has already been eroded. Regardless of the ultimate legal or political fallout of this situation, for the immediate future, Arizona’s election officials have their work cut out for them.
For more details about this developing story, you can check out The Gateway Pundit and Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
