From today’s NPR News:
The Arizona Supreme Court on Friday ruled that nearly 100,000 voters will be able to cast ballots in state and local races this fall, after election officials discovered a flaw in the state’s voter registration system that could have disqualified the voters from weighing in on those contests.
The discovery of the flaw came just weeks before early ballots hit mailboxes.
A state law that went into effect in 2004 requires Arizona voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote in state and local elections, though individuals who don’t provide proof can still register to vote for federal offices like president and U.S. Senate using a federal-only form.
Arizona’s voter registration system pulls information from the state’s driver’s license database as a method of proving citizenship, but the Maricopa County recorder’s office found a flaw with the database, which showed that some people provided proof of citizenship when they applied for a driver’s license, when in fact they may not have.
The issue affects a tiny fraction of the roughly 4.1 million people registered to vote in Arizona — some 98,000 voters who got a license before Oct. 1, 1996, said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on Tuesday.
“That’s the day when Arizona started requiring proof of legal presence in the United States to get a driver’s license,” Fontes said.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who oversees early voting and voter registration in the nation’s fourth-largest county, said his office discovered the glitch in that system while verifying the citizenship of a person with a pre-1996 license. The office found that the person was a lawful permanent resident but not a citizen eligible to vote.
Read the complete story here.