The Arizona Supreme Court will allow 98,000 people who aren’t confirmed citizens of the United States to vote in state and local races, it ruled Friday.
Officials had previously discovered a mistake in the state’s voter rolls in which those voters were allowed to vote the full ballot despite having pre-1996 driver’s licenses, which don’t qualify as proof of citizenship.
Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Stephen Richer, the Republican Maricopa County recorder, couldn’t come to an agreement about what to do with the voters. Richer cast the issue to the state Supreme Court, advising Fontes ignored Arizona law by telling county officials to let affected voters cast full ballots.
Fontes didn’t believe that disenfranchising the voters would cause there to be equal protection and due process concerns given the voters believed they could vote the full ballot.
Ultimately, the court agreed with Fontes and said the county officials don’t have the authority to change the voters’ statuses and had already registered long ago under the penalty of law that they are citizens.
The court maintained that the voters were not at fault for the database error and noted the little time before the Nov. 5 general election.
“We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer stated in the ruling.
Arizona is one of the only states to require proof of citizenship when voting. If a citizen has a post-1996 driver’s license, that would count as proof, as well as a tribal ID number, birth certificate, passport, or naturalization documents.
Voters who cannot provide proof can fill out a federal-only form to register to vote and to cast their vote for president or in the state’s U.S. Senate race.
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Arizona is a hotly contested swing state in the 2024 presidential election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to RealClearPolitics’s polling average for the state, Trump leads Harris 48.4% to 46.8%.