Arizona election officials who suddenly discovered that they hadn’t obtained proof of citizenship from nearly 100,000 registered voters were relieved last month when the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that they wouldn’t be required to ask for it before the November election.
But new details that have come out since then are raising questions about the state’s handling of the error. The Secretary of State’s Office issued a revised estimate that said more than twice as many voters — 218,000 — were affected, indicating that officials didn’t have a clear picture from the Motor Vehicle Division about just how many voters were affected by a database error, or why, when they provided recommendations to the court on how to solve the issue.
State law in Arizona requires voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, but the court had said it was too close to the election to ask these voters for the documents, especially since the problem with collecting the documents wasn’t their fault. These voters — who most probably had the proof but just hadn’t provided it to the state — would be allowed to vote a full ballot in November, the court ruled, rather than being placed on a separate list of voters who can vote only in federal elections.
The problem was at first characterized as a glitch that provided incorrect license issuance dates for the voters to election officials, which signaled to them that the MVD had proof of citizenship on file when it did not. New information obtained by Votebeat this week showed that the MVD has historically categorized anyone with a pre-1996 license as a U.S. citizen, even though the agency has not obtained their proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport. It’s unclear how or whether this would have affected the citizenship checks, which mainly relied on the issuance date.
This has been the case since 2004, when the system was initially programmed, according to a spokesperson with the Arizona Department of Transportation…