Arizona counties won’t be forced to do citizenship checks before the election, a judge rules

PHOENIX (AP) — A judge has rejected a request to require Arizona’s 15 counties to verify the citizenship of some 42,000 voters registered only to vote in federal elections in the presidential battleground state, concluding those who sought the checks made their request too close to the Nov. 5 election and didn’t have legal standing.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of an Arizona voter and the conservative advocacy group Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona sought a court order requiring county recorders to ask federal authorities to verify the citizenship of those voters.

Arizona requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Voters who don’t provide proof of citizenship yet still swear they are U.S. citizens are allowed to vote only for president, the U.S. House or Senate.

The lawsuit alleged officials weren’t complying with a 2022 law requiring the cross-checking of registration information with various government databases.

“They (the plaintiffs) have not made a clearcut showing of harm, nor that the action they request is feasible in the midst of a general election,” U.S. District Judge Krissa Lanham wrote in an order issued Friday.

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Lanham, a nominee of President Joe Biden, said she was declining to force county recorders to divert resources away from preparing for the election and toward citizenship checks just weeks before Election Day.

The plaintiffs told the court that they intend to appeal the ruling.

America First Legal, which is run by former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller and represents the plaintiffs, said in a statement Tuesday that the appeal effort was made “to demand potential illegal aliens and noncitizens are lawfully removed from the Arizona voter rolls.”

Taylor Kinnerup, a spokeswoman for Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, declined to comment on the judge’s order.

The lawsuit alleged it wasn’t enough for county officials to consult the databases and said officials should ask federal authorities to verify the voters’ citizenship status.

After it was pointed out that federal law bars systematic voter-list purges within 90 days of an election, the plaintiffs clarified that they were merely asking that a letter be sent to federal officials inquiring about the citizenship of federal-only voters, according to Lanham. The plaintiffs noted they weren’t seeking the removal of people from voter rolls.

The 42,000 voters at issue in the lawsuit are separate from a much larger group of voters whose citizenship hasn’t been confirmed yet will still be allowed to vote in local, state and federal elections in November, according to the office of Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

About a month ago, officials uncovered a database error that had mistakenly designated nearly 98,000 voters as having access to the full ballot, even though their citizenship status hadn’t been confirmed.

Driver licenses issued after 1996 are considered valid documented proof of citizenship, but the system error marked the original batch of voters who had pre-1996 licenses as eligible to vote in state and local elections.

The state Supreme Court concluded those voters, who were already able to vote in the federal races, could vote in state and local races for the 2024 general election.

A little more than a week later, the number of misclassified voters jumped from almost 98,000 to around 218,000. Fontes’ office has said all people included in the database error remain eligible to vote a full ballot.