Updated September 21, 2024 at 09:52 AM ET
PHOENIX — The Arizona Supreme Court on Friday ruled that nearly 100,000 voters will be able to cast ballots in state and local races this fall, after election officials discovered a flaw in the state’s voter registration system that could have disqualified the voters from weighing in on those contests.
The discovery of the flaw came just weeks before early ballots hit mailboxes.
A state law that went into effect in 2004 requires Arizona voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote in state and local elections, though individuals who don't provide proof can still register to vote for federal offices like president and U.S. Senate using a federal-only form.
Arizona’s voter registration system pulls information from the state’s driver's license database as a method of proving citizenship, but the Maricopa County recorder’s office found a flaw with the database, which showed that some people provided proof of citizenship when they applied for a driver’s license, when in fact they may not have.
The issue affects a tiny fraction of the roughly 4.1 million people registered to vote in Arizona — some 98,000 voters who got a license before Oct. 1, 1996, said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on Tuesday.
“That's the day when Arizona started requiring proof of legal presence in the United States to get a driver's license,” Fontes said.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who oversees early voting and voter registration in the nation’s fourth-largest county, said his office discovered the glitch in that system while verifying the citizenship of a person with a pre-1996 license. The office found that the person was a lawful permanent resident but not a citizen eligible to vote.
Fontes said there is no evidence that person voted or attempted to cast a ballot.
But the discovery sent election officials in Arizona down a rabbit hole that revealed tens of thousands of voters in every county in the state have not provided the documentation required to vote a full ballot under Arizona law.
That doesn’t mean those people aren’t eligible to vote, though, Fontes said.
“This was discovered not because somebody was voting illegally and not because somebody was attempting to vote illegally,” he said. “As far as we can tell, this was basic voter roll maintenance.”
Richer and Fontes had asked the Arizona Supreme Court to decide how to deal with the voters affected by the revelation.
In an emergency petition filed with the court, Richer — a Republican who has defended the county’s election systems from critics like former President Donald Trump — argued the 98,000 voters should not be allowed to vote in federal elections unless they provide proof of citizenship by Election Day.
“It is my position that these registrants have not satisfied Arizona's documented proof of citizenship law, and therefore can only vote a ‘federal-only’ ballot,” said Richer, who was defeated in this year’s Republican primary by a Trump ally.
That "federal only" status would allow them to vote in races like the presidential contest between Trump and Vice President Harris, but would prevent those voters from weighing in on a lengthy list of proposed laws going before Arizona voters this year, including a measure to put abortion rights into the state constitution.
Fontes, a Democrat, called Richer’s filing a “friendly litigation,” saying their offices coordinated the legal effort in order to obtain a firm legal ruling about how to proceed.
Fontes took a different position than his Republican counterpart, seeking to allow the 98,000 impacted voters to vote a full ballot this year.
He said it is too close to an election to make these types of changes to the voter rolls and he doesn’t believe there is evidence that a significant number of the affected individuals are not eligible to vote.
“By the way, every single one of these voters has met the minimum criteria in swearing an affirmation under penalty of perjury that they would have to do to vote in every election across the rest of the United States of America,” he said, adding that only Arizona requires additional proof of citizenship to vote.
Both Richer and Fontes cheered Friday's court ruling.
Fontes had said he hoped to have a ruling by the end of the week as the state begins sending ballots to overseas citizens and military personnel.
Earlier this week, Fontes acknowledged that publicly disclosing the problems with the voter registration system is likely to inflame already high tensions in Arizona and Maricopa County, hotbeds of unproven allegations of voter fraud following Trump’s loss to President Biden in 2020.
“This has already spurred new conspiracy theories about this election, but those conspiracy theories are just as good as all of the other conspiracy theories are,” Fontes said. “We have the facts. We are bringing them forward in a very transparent way.”
But Fontes said election officials had no choice other than to go public.
“We are being open and transparent in bringing this issue forward,” he said. “We are making absolutely certain that folks understand that good, bad or indifferent, we are going to keep the public informed.”
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and former secretary of state, said the Arizona Department of Transportation’s motor vehicle division fixed the problem with the driver’s license database.
“After Recorder Richer brought an erroneous voter registration record to my attention, my team identified and fixed an administrative error that originated in 2004, and affects longtime residents who received a driver’s license before 1996,” Hobbs said in a statement.
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