What happened
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (R) asked the Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday to prohibit nearly 100,000 longtime residents from voting in state and local elections this year, because the state has no evidence they submitted proof of citizenship as required under a 2004 state law. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) argued these voters should be given full ballots, as they have for the past 20 years.
Who said what
“In all likelihood,” the estimated 97,000 registrants across Arizona who have not submitted proof of citizenship are “almost all U.S. citizens,” Richer (pictured above) said on X. Those voters all first obtained Arizona driver’s licenses before 1996, and most of them “lean older and are Republicans,” The Arizona Republic said. All of them “swore under the penalty of criminal charges” that they were citizens and have been on voter rolls “for years.”
While this group is just a “small fragment” of Arizona’s 4.1 million registered voters, they “could be decisive” in statewide races and ballot initiatives, The Washington Post said. They can vote in federal races, thanks to a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
What next?
Richer asked the state high court to rule swiftly, as ballots are supposed to go out to military and overseas voters on Thursday. This mess is the result of policies “driven by conspiracy theories” about illegal voting, Fontes told reporters. It has “never been the case” in the U.S. or Arizona “that noncitizen voting has been anything other than vanishingly rare.”