CNN
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Election officials in the state of Arizona are racing to correct a clerical error that could leave nearly 100,000 voters unable to cast their ballots in state and local elections.
Officials say an error incorrectly stated that these voters had presented documents proving their citizenship – proof required in Arizona to vote in state and local elections – when this was not verifiable.
Such documentation is not required in Arizona to vote in a federal election, so the error would not prevent anyone from voting in the 2024 presidential election. However, it could affect the state legislative elections and Arizona’s referendum on abortion rights.
Former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have raised unfounded concerns, claiming that noncitizens have voted en masse in U.S. elections. Independent experts say illegal voting by noncitizens is extremely rare and quickly discovered.
Officials called the situation in Arizona a “clerical error” and a “coding error” that was not part of an organized plan to undermine the integrity of the 2024 election.
“Ultimately, it was a clerical error that we want to correct in the interest of voters,” said Taylor Kinnerup, a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which helps administer elections in the Phoenix area and discovered the problem earlier this month.
Officials say the 97,000 voters affected by the error had obtained their driver’s licenses before 1996, the year Arizona first required its citizens to show proof of citizenship in order to obtain a driver’s license. At some point later, these people were incorrectly listed on voter rolls as having already proven their citizenship – even though there is no record of this.
The office filed a “friendly lawsuit” on Tuesday, asking the Arizona Supreme Court to decide whether to provide those 97,000 voters with the full 2024 ballot or the special “federal-only” ballot that Arizona uses for residents who don’t meet stricter citizenship requirements. (Those voters can only vote in federal elections — not state ones.)
“These people have certified their citizenship under threat of punishment, so we have no reason to believe they are ineligible,” Kinnerup said. “But according to the letter of the law, as we currently interpret it, they have not provided full proof of their citizenship. That is why we are taking the matter to court. We want to make sure we interpret the law correctly.”
The lawsuit was filed by Maricopa County Clerk Stephen Richer, a Republican who has fought back against right-wing election deniers and defended the legitimacy of the 2020 results.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in a news release that the error affected “long-standing Arizona residents” who are “primarily Republican.” His office is pushing for those 97,000 voters to receive complete ballots – so they can still vote in federal and state elections this year – while Richer wants those voters to receive “federal ballots only.”
“This building has become a fortress of sorts”: How election officials in Arizona are protecting democracy
On Tuesday, Trump published a newspaper article on his Truth Social platform about the Arizona glitch, writing: “An attempt to rig the election!” This is part of Trump’s years-long pattern of repeatedly inciting glitches and errors in the electoral process to stoke unfounded concerns about widespread electoral fraud in the United States.
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 stoke fears that noncitizens could undermine the results, Fontes said in his experience, tough measures usually backfire and result in more eligible voters being purged from the voter rolls.
“I am not proud of the idea that we have denied eligible citizens the right to vote, to a far greater extent than we would have done to prevent the vanishingly small number of non-citizens who vote throughout the United States of America,” Fontes said last week.
