The failure by Arizona officials to document the citizenship of thousands of voters was identified as “a problem” seven years ago — and again during the 2020 presidential election — before it was made public this fall, according to records unearthed by lawyers looking into the matter forArizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) and obtained by The Washington Post.
Arizona law requires voters to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to register to vote in state and local races. Weeks before this year’s general election, county and state election officials realized the state didn’t have documentation of such proof fortens of thousands of longtime voters. A court ruled that the voters could still cast their ballots, but the issue highlighted a major flaw in state systems and fed into false narratives about widespread voting by noncitizens, which is rare.
Fontes and his lawyer now suggest that there were opportunities to fixthe problem years ago.
Records show that staff working in previous Democratic and Republican administrations struggled to understand why noncitizens were classified in a motor vehicle database as eligible to vote when they should not have been. Arizonans can register to vote while getting a driver’s license, so that’s often the place where they provide their proof of citizenship.“This needs to be discussed further,” one secretary of state employee wrote to a colleague in 2017 when the issue cropped up. Three years later, employees of then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) found that a noncitizen who had been mailed a ballot was inaccurately classified in one state database as a citizen.
The emails are among the thousands of documents reviewed by a team tasked by Fontes to determine who was aware of the problem, when it was discovered and what had been done — if anything — to fix it. That review, which is limited to the secretary of state’s records, is ongoing. An attorney involved wrote last week that “there are no documents located as of yet reflecting anything was done to remedy or even mitigate the [Motor Vehicle Division] Issue or to formally document it for future administrations so they would be aware of the situation and could take any necessary corrective or mitigating action.”…