Nearly 100,000 voters who haven’t submitted citizenship documents might be prevented from participating in Arizona’s state and local elections.
A coding error has allowed approximately 98,000 people in Maricopa County to vote in Arizona without proof of citizenship for decades. Gov. Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced on Tuesday that Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer discovered this error during “routine voter roll maintenance” and reported it on Sept. 7.
The error affects voters who received their driver’s licenses before Oct. 1, 1996. Before that date, individuals did not have to provide proof of residency to register to vote. They only had to swear affirmation under penalty of perjury, which is the status quo for the rest of the U.S.
However, if those individuals were reissued a driver’s license sometime after 2004 – when the Access Voter Information Database began malfunctioning in this way – the system did not require the Motor Vehicle Division to ask for proof of citizenship.
“MVD issues duplicate licenses as a replacement to an existing, active credential,” Hobbs said in a news release. “If an applicant was issued a license on or before 10/1/1996 but got a duplicate license after 10/1/1996, the operative issuance date in that person’s MVD record is updated to the date the duplicate was issued. The AVID system was programmed to query the duplicate issuance date and would not alert the county that the license was originally issued before 10/1/1996. As soon as I became aware of the problem, I directed MVD to work with the SOS to aggressively develop and implement a solution and, out of an abundance of caution, will be implementing an independent audit to ensure that MVD systems are functioning as necessary to support voter registration.”
Since federal law requires that residents only have to swear affirmation under oath, Arizona residents who do not provide proof of citizenship are still able to vote in federal elections, but cannot vote in the local elections.
