Longtime Arizona voters told to provide proof of citizenship after error – Washington Examiner
Recently, long-time voters in Arizona have been notified that they must provide proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote again, due to a decades-old oversight by state election officials. Approximately 200,000 residents who registered to vote using their Arizona driver’s license before October 1996 are affected. they are being asked to submit documentation such as a birth certificate or passport to validate their citizenship. If they fail to respond, these voters could be restricted to voting only in federal elections or may be removed from the voter rolls entirely. This issue was discovered just prior to the 2024 general election, leading to various counties, including Gila and Mohave, sending out letters, while others like Maricopa County plan to wait until after the 2025 local elections. The problem stems from confusion over a law requiring proof of citizenship,wich was approved by voters in 2004 but has faced legal challenges as then.
Longtime Arizona voters told to provide proof of citizenship after decadeslong error
Approximately 5% of Arizona voters will need to confirm their proof of citizenship with the state following a decadeslong error.
Arizona counties have slowly begun sending letters to thousands of longtime voters, instructing them to provide documentation proving their citizenship before they vote again, according to a report from VoteBeat. Around 200,000 longtime residents are set to receive these letters after they were inadvertently caught up in a statewide error that did not track voters’ proof of citizenship.
The letter requests the voters provide a birth certificate, passport, or other documents to prove their citizenship. If voters do not respond with the required documents, they will eventually be restricted to voting only in federal elections or removed from the Arizona voter roll.
Affected people include those who received an Arizona driver’s license before October 1996 and then used that license to register to vote at some point after 2004, including those who moved across the state.
Each county is handling the situation differently. At least Gila, Mohave, and Pinal counties have begun to send out letters to voters. Maricopa County, where more than 60% of the state lives, is waiting until after the 2025 local elections, which occur on different dates around the state.
The problem began weeks before the 2024 general election, when county and state officials realized many voters who had cast ballots in the state for decades did not provide proof of citizenship. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that state and county officials should wait until after the election to address the problem.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes at the time said the discovery was an “evolving situation” but noted that the law and court precedent supported all of the registrants’ ability to vote in Arizona’s federal, state, and local elections.
In 2004, voters approved a measure that required proof of citizenship to register to vote. Since then, county recorders have mostly relied on a person’s driver’s license information to check their citizenship status and eligibility to vote,
However, after nearly a decade of litigation, the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that federal law prevented Arizona from requiring proof of citizenship to vote for president and other federal offices, so the law only stood for state and local elections.
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To comply with that ruling, Arizona now has a dual-registration system: Those who provide citizenship documents receive full ballots that include local, state, and federal races, and those who do not provide those documents receive ballots with only races for federal offices.
Any affected voter should have their registration flagged on the state’s voter registration records website.
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