After concerns arose last year over the numbers of noncitizens on Arizona’s voter rolls, Governor Katie Hobbs ordered an audit to determine why there were so many.
The audit, which was released last week, examined the problems that arose at the Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) within the Arizona Department of Transportation, which offers “motor voter” automatic voter registration to Arizonans conducting driving-related transactions. The audit investigated a “glitch” allowing over 200,000 voters who did not show documented proof of citizenship (DPOC) before 1996 and found another glitch allowing U.S. nationals to register to vote.
Merissa Hamilton, co-founder of the conservative grassroots EZAZ, which performs election integrity work, spoke to The Arizona Sun Times about the audit.
“I have little to no confidence that neither MVD or the Governor’s task force have identified and resolved all of the issues with the voter registration and management process,” she said. “A voter we identified last year that stated they are not a citizen and do not know how they got registered wasn’t identified as being part of this problem investigated by the Secretary’s office. Clearly, there are still unidentified non-citizens on the voter rolls. The voters deserve a comprehensive audit of the rolls with a thorough review by DHS. The clown show that our election administration has come to be known as nationally must end. Our taxpayers deserve best-in-class elections.”
The controversy emerged last fall when it was discovered that 202,760 voters who obtained driver’s licenses in October 1996 or earlier had never provided DPOC to register to vote. Then-Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer filed a “friendly” lawsuit against Secretary of State (AZSOS) Adrian Fontes, requesting that ballots from those voters be rejected. America First Legal submitted an amicus curiae brief in the lawsuit, suggesting that the ballots be counted but also providing a way for county recorders to verify the citizenship of those voters through federal databases. The Arizona Supreme Court rejected the alternative option and allowed the 202,760 voters to cast ballots.
The 138-page audit was prepared by the MVD and two retired county recorders. Retired Yuma County Recorder Robyn Stallworth-Pouquette and Retired Coconino County Recorder Patty Hansen stated, “[W]e found that statutory changes in one area failed to contemplate the challenges imposed by the changes to the other.” They confirmed that the glitch occurred when “Arizonans who had been issued licenses prior to 1996 … were incorrectly coded as having provided proof of citizenship.”
Before 1996, state law didn’t require proof of authorized presence in the U.S. to obtain a driver’s license. When motor voter laws were passed, they did not consider voters who requested duplicate driver’s licenses after 1996 — who were not required to show proof of authorized presence for that type of routine transaction. In 2004, Prop. 200 required DPOC in order to register to vote.
After the problem was discovered last fall, the MVD conducted a review and discovered that 202,760 voters were impacted, who still needed to show DPOC. The audit concluded regarding the problem, “This report concludes that MVD has provided election officials with the full list of active MVD records that could be impacted by this issue and that a solution is in place moving forward.”
The audit found another significant lingering problem. At the MVD, U.S. passports are considered proof of authorized presence. However, U.S. nationals — who are not U.S. citizens but residents of U.S. territories and islands, so they are not eligible to vote — can have U.S. passports. The audit admitted, “MVD does not presently know whether any U.S. nationals have been issued licenses after providing U.S. passports as proof of authorized presence and has no practicable way to ascertain how many U.S. nationals have an Arizona-issued driver license.”
The audit claimed that because applicants are required to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, there must be only a small number. However, it offered no evidence that checking a box asserting this acts as much of a deterrent.
The audit also “identified 7,265 inactive MVD records that overlap with an active voter registration,” which the report said needs to be dealt with. Voters whose licenses have expired or canceled should have their citizenship status updated, the audit recommended.
The audit also recommended improving communication between the AZSOS and the MVD. The AZSOS maintains the voter registration database for 13 of Arizona’s 15 counties, so when those counties check a voter’s citizenship, they query the MVD’s database.
The issue of noncitizens voting in elections became a hot topic nationwide last year, with X owner Elon Musk often posting about it. AFL stated in its brief last fall that margins of less than 1 percent have decided recent races in Arizona. A study from 2014 published at Old Dominion University found that enough noncitizens vote “to change important election outcomes, ”including “Electoral College votes and Senate races.” Trump lost Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020 by 10,457 votes. An increasing number of illegal immigrants were expected to vote for Democrats in the 2024 election.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “People Voting” by Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0.
This is so damn asinine. These people are in our country illegally and should not be given a DL, OR ANY OTHER KIND OF ID! Then they wouldn’t show up on the voter rolls.But if that happened, it would much harder the the democrats to cheat in elections.