Jen Fifield, Votebeat

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

After Kari Lake lost her U.S. Senate race in November, some skeptics cried election fraud. They doubted that so many people who voted for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who carried Arizona, would split their ticket and back Ruben Gallego, Lake’s Democratic opponent.

In the past, local election analysts could counter such claims by analyzing a dataset known as the cast vote record — an electronic record of each anonymous ballot cast and all the votes recorded on it, including split-ticket votes. ...

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

As lawmakers across the country consider requiring documented proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, Arizona’s voter roll provides clues as to which voters will struggle to provide it.

Voters living on Native land, on college campuses, and at the state’s main homeless campus are all disproportionately represented among voters in Arizona who haven’t provided proof of citizenship, according to a Votebeat analysis of the list of eligible voters who hadn’t provided proof of citizenship for the presidential election. Such voters also were three times less likely to vote this past November than voters who had provided proof of citizenship, the analysis found. ...

This story was published by Votebeat in partnership with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. Votebeat is a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. The Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting is an independent, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide investigative reporting. Sign up for the AZCIR newsletter and Votebeat Arizona newsletter.

Nate Kennedy was in a hurry when he arrived at a Motor Vehicle Division office in 2021 to get his driver’s license. He’d just moved back from out of state and marked the box to register to vote, quickly scribbling his signature on the electronic pad.

He was all set to become one of the thousands of voters not affiliated with a political party who would play a key role in determining the state’s leaders in the next midterm election. ...

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Conservative groups want a federal judge to force Arizona counties to further investigate the status of voters who have not provided documented proof of citizenship.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Arizona claims that counties haven’t been checking the citizenship status of these voters using specific methods required under federal and state law, including two new state laws enacted in 2022....

Many Arizona residents seeking to register to vote ahead of Tuesday’s primary were blocked from the voter rolls because of problems with the paper registration forms they used, according to a Votebeat analysis of longstanding issues with the forms.

The paper forms are the type commonly distributed and collected by civic groups and political parties during voter registration drives. Election officials around the state value these third-party outreach efforts, but have said for years that forms they’re receiving often have inaccuracies or other deficiencies, such as a missing ID number, birthdate or signature, or a bogus name. Such lapses complicate the work of county recorders, and may disenfranchise even some voters who are already registered.

Votebeat was able to collect data that shows for the first time the extent of the problem. In Maricopa County, around a third of the voters who tried to register with a paper form in the week before a July 1 deadline were found to be likely eligible to register, but nonetheless had their registration blocked because of a problem with the form, according to new data obtained by Votebeat. ...