The situation stems from a unique-to-Arizona state law that requires voters to prove their citizenship before they can legally register to vote, and regards an Arizona driver’s license issued after October 1996 to be sufficient proof. A coding error in the state’s DMV database incorrectly marked tens of thousands of voters, mainly in Maricopa County, as having complied with the identification requirements when they had not, through no fault of their own. These are primarily long-term residents and voters who have (or had, until recently) no idea they were not correctly registered.
There is no evidence that a significant number of the Arizona residents caught up in this bureaucratic mix-up are non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote. Chief Justice Ann Timmer justified the decision: “We are unwilling, on these facts, to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests.”
Yet the controversy surrounding the voters caught in the citizenship and identification mix-up does not end with the decision to allow them to vote in the 2024 election. On November 4, the same court affirmed a lower court decision requiring Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ office to turn over the entire list of affected voters to various legislative officials, with no positive assurance that the names would be kept confidential. The decision followed a public records request and subsequent appeals from America First Legal, founded by former Trump administration official and anti-immigrant stalwart Stephen Miller.
Miller, one of the architects of the Trump immigration policy, was one of the featured speakers at the controversial Trump Madison Square Garden rally on October 27, 2024, during which he proclaimed that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Widely considered a likely appointee to another Trump administration, it’s disturbing that the same Arizona justices who found that these voters deserved the right to vote but did not extend them a fundamental right of privacy when the request originated from such a thoroughly partisan source. This is even less conscionable given that the Arizona Legislature has, according to the Arizona Mirror, “been a breeding ground for conspiracy theories surrounding elections, going back to 2020 when some state lawmakers held a news conference where they made spurious accusations of election fraud.”
