A conservative group run by one of former President Donald Trump’s top legal aides is suing Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes for withholding the names of the 218,000 voters who have been improperly registered to vote because of a glitch in the state’s driver’s license database.
The decades-long glitch, which was first discovered last month, resulted in some Arizonans who had gotten a driver’s license before 1996 being inaccurately labeled as having provided proof of citizenship, which is a requirement to register to vote in the Grand Canyon State.
The error in the database used by the state’s Motor Vehicles Division affects people with pre-1996 licenses who had received replacements. They had been registered to vote for decades, but were never asked to prove their citizenship because of the “data coding oversight” in the system.
The Secretary of State’s Office has said the affected voters include 79,000 Republicans, 61,000 Democrats and 76,000 listed as “other party.”
Arizonans who cannot provide proof of citizenship in the state are only permitted to vote in federal races because voters in 2004 approved a ballot measure requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
After Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer asked the Arizona Supreme Court last month to order county elections officials to send the affected voters — at the time, only 98,000 had been identified — a federal-only ballot, the high court ruled that there was nothing in state law allowing county recorders to unilaterally change the registration status of the voters.
But it did note that state law allows for challenges to individual voters’ registration status, and that county recorders should deal with any such challenges to these voters under that law.
Now, the conservative non-profit America First Legal, led by Stephen Miller, a former senior advisor to Trump and the architect of his anti-immigration policies, is suing Fontes’ office to produce records of the voters by Oct. 7.
America First Legal and Jennifer Wright, the former head of the Arizona attorney general’s Election Integrity Unit, filed the lawsuit on behalf of Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, a nonprofit led by conservative activist Merissa Hamilton.
According to the lawsuit, Hamilton’s group filed a records request after news of the issue broke seeking “a subset of the Statewide Voter Registration Database (VRDB) that contains only those registered (active and inactive) voters that” were part of the data glitch.
Confusion and chaos
A few days later, the Secretary of State’s Office responded saying that the records “will be made available for inspection at the soonest available time and to the extent the law allows access. But no access will occur before the 2024 General Election.” Fontes’ office said that releasing that information now “would create confusion, chaos, uncertainty and consternation among the public — all of which is avoidable, and indeed must be avoided amid an ongoing election during which we expect to receive record turnout.”
The group is suing to make those records available before early voting begins on Oct. 9.
“We are suing the state of Arizona for refusing to provide the list of 218,000 voters who failed or refused to establish citizenship. It is absolutely imperative that we stop the dire threat of illegal alien voting, which is the gravest form of foreign election interference,” Miller said in a press release about the lawsuit.
There is no evidence that any of the voters affected, who have all lived in Arizona for decades, are undocumented immigrants. Data has indicated that voting by non-citizens is extremely rare.
The Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to a request for comment, but Fontes did issue a press release providing an update on what his office has done since the discovery, including engaging with multiple state and county agencies to confirm voter identities.
“We need to keep in mind that this situation happened through no fault of the impacted individual registrants,” Fontes said in the written statement. “All of the Arizonans affected by this issue remain eligible voters and are long-time Arizona residents. All have attested under penalty of perjury – the same standard the rest of the country uses – that they are U.S. citizens. Had it not been for the unique burden created by the implementation of Arizona’s Prop 200 in 2004, this issue wouldn’t even exist.”
Fontes previously said that the voters were “mistakenly marked as having provided documentary proof of citizenship” and that state agencies are working to figure out a fix. Election officials are planning to contact the affected voters after the general election. In the meantime, those who are affected are still eligible to vote a full ballot.
Gov. Katie Hobbs has ordered an independent audit of the Motor Vehicle Division’s registration system in light of the discovery.
The issue comes just five weeks before the Nov. 5 election, and just days before early voting begins. Ballots for overseas and military voters have already been sent out.
This story was first published by Arizona Mirror, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
