Because of a 20-year-old government foul-up, about 200,000 Arizona voters will need to come up with proof of their citizenship soon in order to protect their full voting rights, and they might not even know about it yet.
County officials waited six months for the Secretary of State’s Office to give them the final list of affected voters who need to be contacted, and clear legal guidance on how to do that so voters are treated fairly across the state. After all, in a few counties, the next elections are coming up in March or May.
But while Secretary of State Adrian Fontes recently sent the officials the final voter list and provided a few options on how to move forward, he ultimately declined to offer the kind of uniform guidance counties wanted. That leaves the county recorders who manage voter rolls scrambling now to resolve key questions on their own, such as how much time to give voters to respond, and when to cancel voters who don’t provide the proof.
Fontes’ office has been dealing with the problem since it was disclosed in the weeks before the November election. He ordered an investigation to scour emails from past administrations to see who knew about the problem, fired the state’s voter registration director in October, and fired another top voter registration official in December, Votebeat learned through public records requests.
Critics of Fontes’ approach say it has dwelled too much on placing blame, rather than figuring out what needs to be done now to get the voter rolls straightened out before the next election. The ensuing recriminations have pitted Fontes and his office against Gov. Katie Hobbs, his predecessor, along with county officials, and former members of his own staff….