Arizona election officials admit that they “accidentally” enrolled almost 100,000 ineligible voters as eligible to vote in the 2024 election.
Arizona has some of the strictest laws in the country against noncitizens registering to vote. Still, officials say they checked the box on 97,000 people who had not submitted proof of their U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Arizona Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced Tuesday that the state incorrectly marked these registered voters as having already provided proof of citizenship when they hadn’t, reported VoteBeat Arizona.
“Recently, officials found that some long-term Arizonans, who were registered under less strict rules, had not been asked to meet the new standards due to a coding oversight,” Fontes said in a statement.
Fontes claims that the majority of the people affected by this issue are longtime residents and that it hurts more Republican voters than anyone else. Still, a Maricopa County election official found a person on the county’s voter rolls who had not submitted the proper proof of citizenship requirements but was still added to the state’s voter rolls. This person was in the country legally with a green card but was not eligible to vote because they weren’t a U.S. citizen, according to Fontes.
There are just over forty days left to fix it.