Arizona counties won’t be forced to do citizenship checks before the election, a judge rules
PHOENIX — A judge has denied a request to require Arizona’s 15 counties to verify the citizenship of about 42,000 voters registered only to vote in federal elections in the presidential state. had no legal status.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of an Arizona voter and the conservative advocacy group Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona sought an injunction requiring county recorders to ask federal authorities to verify the citizenship of those voters.
Arizona requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Voters who do not provide proof of citizenship and yet swear that they are U.S. citizens may only vote for president, U.S. House or Senate.
The lawsuit alleged that officials failed to comply with a 2022 law that required the cross-checking of registration information with various government databases.
“They (the plaintiffs) have not clearly shown that harm exists nor that the action they seek is feasible in the midst of the general election,” U.S. District Judge Krissa Lanham wrote in an order issued Friday.
Lanham, a candidate of President Joe Biden, said she refused to force county recorders to divert resources from election preparation and toward citizenship checks just weeks before Election Day.
The plaintiffs told the court they plan to appeal the ruling.
America First Legal, which is run by former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller and represents the plaintiffs, said in a statement Tuesday that the call was made “to demand that potential illegal aliens and noncitizens be lawfully removed from the voter rolls in Arizona.”
Taylor Kinnerup, spokeswoman for Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, declined to comment on the judge’s order.
The lawsuit alleged that it was not enough for county officials to check the databases and said officials should ask federal authorities to verify voters’ citizenship status.
After it was pointed out that federal law prohibits systematic purges of voter rolls within 90 days of an election, prosecutors clarified that they were merely asking for a letter to be sent to federal officials inquiring about the citizenship of federal voters only, Lanham said . . Prosecutors noted that they were not trying to remove people from the voter list.
The 42,000 voters at issue in the lawsuit are separate from a much larger group of voters whose citizenship has not yet been confirmed and who are still eligible to vote in local, state and federal elections in November, the Secretary of State’s office said of Foreign Affairs Adrian. Fonts.
About a month ago, officials discovered a database error wrongly designated nearly 98,000 voters because they had access to the full ballot even though their citizenship had not been confirmed.
Driver’s licenses issued after 1996 are considered valid documented proof of citizenship, but the system error classified the original group of voters with pre-1996 driver’s licenses as eligible to vote in state and local elections.
The state Supreme Court concluded that voters, who could already vote in federal races, could vote in state and local races for the 2024 general elections.
Just over a week later, the number of voters misclassified rose from almost 98,000 to about 218,000. Fontes’ office has said all people included in the database error remain eligible for a full ballot.