Arizona officials race to fix ‘clerical error’ for voters who haven’t proved citizenship

By Marshall Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Election officials in Arizona are racing to correct a clerical error that could shut out nearly 100,000 voters from casting ballots in state and local races.

Officials say a glitch mistakenly marked that these voters had provided documentation proving their citizenship – which is required to vote in state and local races in Arizona – when there’s no record that they had.

Such documentation isn’t required to cast ballots for federal office in Arizona, so the glitch would not affect anyone’s ability to vote in the 2024 presidential election. But it could affect state legislative races and Arizona’s ballot referendum on abortion rights.

Former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have raised baseless concerns claiming that massive numbers of noncitizens have voted in US elections. Nonpartisan experts say illegal voting by noncitizens is extremely rare and is quickly caught.

Officials have described the Arizona situation as a “clerical error” and a “coding glitch” that isn’t part of any organized scheme to undermine the integrity of the 2024 election.

“At the end of the day, it was a clerical error that we want to get resolved for the voters,” said Taylor Kinnerup, a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Recorder’s office, which helps run elections in the Phoenix area and discovered the problem earlier this month.

Officials said the 97,000 voters affected by the error got their driver’s license before 1996, which is the year Arizona started requiring residents to prove their citizenship to obtain a license. At some point later, these people were miscategorized in the voter rolls as having already proved their citizenship – even though there is no record of that happening.

The office filed a “friendly lawsuit” on Tuesday, asking the Arizona Supreme Court to decide if they should provide these 97,000 voters with the full 2024 ballot or the special “federal-only” ballot that Arizona uses for residents who haven’t fulfilled the stricter citizenship requirements. (Those voters can only vote in federal – not state – elections.)

“These people have attested, under penalty of law, that they are citizens, so we have no reason to believe they aren’t eligible,” Kinnerup said. “But according to the letter of the law, as we interpret it currently, they have not provided full proof of citizenship. That’s why we’re going to court. We want to ensure that we’re interpreting the law correctly.”

The lawsuit was filed by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who stood up to right-wing election deniers and defended the legitimacy of the 2020 results.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in a press release that the flaw affected “longtime Arizonans” who were “mostly Republicans.” His office is pushing for these 97,000 voters to get full ballots – so they can still vote in both federal and state races this year – while Richer wants these voters to receive the “federal-only” ballots.

Trump took to his Truth Social platform Tuesday to share a news article about the Arizona glitch, and writing, “Trying to Rig the Election!” This is part of Trump’s yearslong pattern of fanning the flames around routine mishaps and errors in the voting process to raise unfounded concerns about widespread fraud in US elections.

Fontes and other secretaries of state were on Capitol Hill last week to testify about their efforts to secure the 2024 election. While Republicans used the hearing to raise fears about noncitizens undermining the results, Fontes said that in his experience, efforts to crack down usually backfire and end up removing more eligible voters from the rolls.

“I take no pride in the idea that we have denied eligible citizens the right to vote, in far greater numbers than we would have prevented the vanishingly rare noncitizen voting that is alleged to be happening across the United States of America,” Fontes said last week.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.