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Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has provided guidance to the state’s county recorders on how to handle a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that changed the state’s voter registration law just 10 weeks before the election.
The nation’s high court on Aug. 22 ruled that Arizona can enforce part of a voter registration law that is being challenged in federal court, effectively allowing the state to bar some legal voters from registering to vote.
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Arizona voters in 2004 approved a law that requires people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. However, the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to accept federal voter registration forms, which do not have that requirement. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Arizona cannot reject those forms.
That created a dual system where voters who prove their citizenship can vote in every race on the ballot, while those who attest to being citizens under penalty of perjury but fail to provide documentation can only vote in federal contests. Arizona has approximately 32,000 “federal only” voters, many of whom are or were students.
The U.S. Supreme Court last month reinstated a portion of the contested 2022 law that had been blocked by a lower court judge, allowing the state to stop accepting state-created voter registration forms from Arizona residents unless they provide documented proof of citizenship.
Mayes, at the request of Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, on Sept. 23 issued a legal opinion to guide county recorders through how to handle the changes to voter registration law ahead of the rapidly-approaching election.
In the opinion, Mayes instructed county recorders to check the Motor Vehicle Division database for documented proof of citizenship if a state voter registration form is submitted without proof of citizenship. If a registrant is “otherwise eligible to register to vote” and their citizenship is proven through the check with the MVD — the state requires drivers to prove citizenship or legal immigration status — then “the county recorder must register the applicant as a full ballot voter because that individual has complied with all statutory registration requirements,” Mayes wrote.
Mayes also cleared up a discrepancy between Arizona law and a federal consent decree regarding the deadline for voter registration applicants to supply proof of citizenship. The attorney general advised county recorders to go with the state’s deadline of 7 p.m. on Election Day, instead of 5 p.m. on the Thursday prior, as outlined in the consent decree.
She also clarified that, if a county recorder notifies a person that their voter registration application is missing proof of citizenship, and proof is supplied prior to 7 p.m. on Election Day, the applicant should be considered registered on the date the registration was received.
This is important because the deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 5 election is Oct. 7.
In the Supreme Court’s split decision last month, the court handed a win to the Republican National Committee and Arizona legislative leaders Ben Toma, the speaker of the state House of Representatives, and Warren Petersen, the state Senate president, who challenged a lower court’s decision to block the law.
The high court declined a request by the Republican National Committee to reinstate a portion of the law that would bar Arizonans who had not provided proof of citizenship from voting by mail in presidential elections.
An analysis by Votebeat found that the Arizona law, approved by a Republican-controlled legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, was likely to disproportionately affect younger voters who live on college campuses and often register to vote without proper documents.
The portion of the law being contested that can now be enforced is aimed at stopping non-citizens from voting in the state by requiring citizenship checks on the federal voter forms.
Republicans have been falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and cite noncitizens voting as a widespread problem across the country. There is no evidence to support that claim and studies have shown that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare.
Last week, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer alerted Fontes that around 97,000 Arizonans were improperly registered to vote. The voters, mostly Republicans who had been issued driver’s licenses prior to 1996, had failed to provide documented proof of citizenship because of a MVD computer glitch. Many Republicans, including the Arizona GOP and state legislative leaders, argued that their registration status should not be impacted so close to the election. The Arizona Supreme Court agreed with them in a Sept. 20 ruling in which the justices said no law authorizes county recorders to change those voters’ registration status.
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