Roughly 100,000 Arizona residents who have not submitted citizenship documents could be barred from voting in state and local elections due to a new lawsuit.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer filed a lawsuit regarding a “flaw” in the system that caused specific residents to be registered to vote despite them not having provided valid proof of citizenship, as required by Arizona law.
Any license issued after October 1996 is considered a valid proof of citizenship. However, the error occurred because these approximately 97,000 residents received a license before then and later received a replacement one, whereby they were erroneously automatically deemed to have provided proof of citizenship.
Richer’s lawsuit seeks to bar these residents from voting in state and local elections in 2024, but the same doesn’t apply to federal elections, which do not require the same proof of documents.
“This flaw has existed since 2004. In every county. Across the state,” he said in a lengthy X post. Richer oversees the public recording of documents in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest.