This week, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of Arizona activists against Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and the Secretary of State’s Office for what they claim is the illegal withholding from the public of a list of over 218,000 individuals who registered to vote without providing proof of citizenship as required by law.
According to the organization that filed the lawsuit, America First Legal (AFL), Fontes administers Arizona’s system that performs statewide voter registration checks to determine if an individual has provided proof of U.S. citizenship, as required by Arizona law. On September 6, 2024, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer identified a flaw in the system that had allowed tens of thousands of individuals to register to vote even though they hadn’t provided proof of citizenship.
This flaw was revealed to the public when Recorder Richer filed an Emergency Petition in the Arizona Supreme Court on September 17. This lawsuit sought to prevent the affected voter registrants from voting in state and local races. As part of that lawsuit, Secretary Fontes confirmed that he had identified 97,928 registered voters who had been incorrectly marked because of the system flaw as having provided documentary proof of citizenship, even though they had never done so.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that these voters should not be moved onto the “Federal-Only” list but should be allowed to remain registered to vote in state and local elections. However, the Court also ruled that county recorders could continue to maintain voter lists to investigate whether these voters really were citizens.
Within hours of Recorder Richer filing his lawsuit on September 17, AFL filed a public records request on behalf of its client, EZAZ.org. The request asked Fontes to produce the list of every individual who had been unlawfully registered to vote.
However, Secretary Fontes declined the request through a letter written by his attorney.
AFL complains that “rather than treating constituents with respect and decorum, their response was a bombastic tirade that invoked a bizarre conspiracy theory accusing EZAZ.org of secretly planning to harass the voters on the list. There is, of course, no evidence to support Secretary Fontes’s conspiracy theory, and EZAZ.org has no intention of harassing anyone. Secretary Fontes also feebly claimed that compiling the list would be too hard for his staff. None of these excuses hold water. Fontes’s staff has already compiled the list–that’s how they know the number of affected voters. And there is no risk that these voters will be harassed–EZAZ.org’s mission is all about protecting voters.
Arizona’s Public Records Law requires Secretary Fontes to produce this type of voter information for members of the public who request it, and Secretary Fontes’s Office regularly produces voter lists in response to such requests.
AFL claims that Fontes, in his denial, “was unable to provide even one example of voter harassment caused by producing voter lists as part of a public records request.
Fontes has also refused to share the full list of affected voters with county recorders, making it impossible for them to check whether these individuals are citizens.
AFL says that Fontes’s refusal is “puzzling because Arizona law requires county recorders to do monthly investigations on every registered voter who has failed to provide citizenship until the individual’s citizenship has been confirmed or disconfirmed.”
On September 30, 2024, the Secretary announced that the problem was much bigger than he had disclosed to the Arizona Supreme Court. Specifically, he claimed to have discovered an additional “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.” This means that the number of registered voters who have never provided proof of citizenship is 218,000. To put that in perspective, the official results for the presidential race in Arizona 2020 list the margin of victory as being only 10,457 votes.
