Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is moving forward with allowing about 218,000 registered voters to participate in the 2024 election despite lingering questions about their citizenship.
The conservative group America First Legal sued to receive a list of the voters by Monday, while a Republican state lawmaker demanded the list in a letter. Fontes, an elected Democrat, resisted those calls, and now an Arizona court will hear arguments over Fontes’s decision to withhold the list on Oct. 15.
The revelation that hundreds of thousands of registered voters were not properly documented in a key border and battleground state came about after election officials initially discovered that 98,000 Arizonans who had received driver’s licenses before the fall of 1996 were registered to vote but may not have provided the state Department of Transportation with their citizenship status. Election officials use the transportation records to cross-check their voter rolls.
Fontes then revealed last week that the number had at least doubled, calling the discovery an “evolving situation” but emphasizing that the law and court precedent support all of the registrants being able to vote in Arizona’s federal, state, and local elections in 2024.