Republicans in Arizona over the past several years have enacted proof-of-citizenship requirements for registered voters with the purported goal of eliminating the threat of undocumented immigrants from voting.
However, Just Security reports that many of these same Republicans have been changing their tune recently after they discovered that the law would purge a large number of registered Republicans.
As Just Security writes, the trouble started last month when Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer "discovered that a glitch in Arizona’s driver’s license database caused nearly 100,000 registered voters not to meet the proof of citizenship requirements under the state’s recently revised election laws."
Richer filed an emergency petition with the Arizona Supreme Court arguing that the law states that these voters should be deemed ineligible to vote in upcoming elections, only to be opposed in court by the same Republicans who had long championed such rules.
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Data obtained by Just Security sheds light on exactly why Richer's filing concerned Arizona Republicans so much.
Overall, registered Republicans represented 37 percent of the voters affected by the glitch, while registered Democrats made up 27 percent and unaffiliated voters represented 29 percent.
Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes tells Just Security that the GOP's reversal on this issue shows how little they care for actually maintaining election integrity.
"In my effort to affirm nearly 100,000 Arizonans who hadn’t yet provided citizenship documentation into fully registered voters, the Republican Party and state legislative leaders joined the initiative,” Fontes said. “Their involvement was not out of concern for non-citizen voting—which they know isn’t an issue—but because more Republicans would have been affected, potentially altering legislative control and impacting certain initiatives. This was about political self-preservation. At this point, Arizona Republicans can no longer credibly claim that their concern is non-citizen voting.”