On Monday, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes revealed that over 218,000 voters were improperly recorded as having provided proof of citizenship, a requirement for voting in state and local elections.
The Arizona Republican Party is calling the situation a voter “registration crisis.”
After sops and starts over the weekend, on Monday the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office released additional information about a new set of approximately 120,000 Arizonans who may be affected by a data coding oversight within ADOT’s Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) and Arizona voter registration databases—individuals who have lived in the state for decades and have attested under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens.
This data set includes approximately 79,000 Republicans, 61,000 Democrats, and 76,000 Other Party (OTH), bringing the total of impacted individuals to approximately 218,000.
The Arizona GOP released he following statement in response to the news:
“Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has repeatedly demonstrated a complete inability to execute the core functions of his position. The public, impacted stakeholders, and the Arizona Supreme Court were misled as to the extent of the issue and its effect on Arizona’s voter registration records.
The AZGOP demands that Secretary Fontes IMMEDIATELY make public the SQL query used to determine in the voter records impacted by this error and that his office IMMEDIATELY deliver the list of impacted voters to all 15 county recorders.
Secretary Fontes’ desire for a top down system continues to shut out our county recorders who are the ONLY officials empowered by Arizona statute to process voter registration record changes.
This is a sad day for transparency.
The voters of Arizona have a total loss of confidence in Secretary Fontes. The AZGOP will continue to work toward transparency in all of our elections process.
Fontes’ office says “In spite of the evolving situation, the Supreme Court’s underlying September 20th decision about this issue stands. As with the initial group of Arizonans, certain individuals were mistakenly marked as having provided documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) pursuant to Arizona’s Proposition 200 requiring DPOC to vote in state and local elections.”
The Arizona voter registration database now has the correctly flagged the impacted individuals as needing proof of citizenship, according to Fontes.
Election officials will contact the affected Arizonans with information regarding their status after the conclusion of this General Election if necessary. In the meantime, all individuals included in the database error remain eligible to vote a full ballot. This will give election officials the opportunity to verify that everyone affected truly is required to provide documentary proof of citizenship.
Similar to the initial announcement, the newly discovered issue pertains to misclassification of voters with a driver’s license issued before 1996. Arizona requires residents to provide DPOC to vote in state and local elections. In data shared with the secretary of state’s office, MVD has been classifying these individuals with older credentials, from whom MVD never collected proof of authorized presence due to their original credential issue date, as having provided DPOC.
Staff and experts from the Secretary of State’s Office are continuing to work with MVD to investigate if additional voters are impacted, or if other similar errors stemming from improperly coded Proposition 200 rules exist.
