America First Legal has filed a new lawsuit on behalf of Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, known as “EZAZ.org,” against Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and the Secretary of State’s Office for withholding from the public a list of over 218,000 individuals who registered to vote without providing proof of citizenship, the legal group announced in a press release Thursday.
Under Arizona law, the secretary of state’s office is required to conduct reviews of voter registration logs to make sure proof of citizenship was provided when registering. On September 6, 2024, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer identified a “flaw” in the system that had allowed tens of thousands of individuals to register without providing proof of citizenship.
The error was first revealed to the public when Richer filed an emergency petition to the Arizona Supreme Court on September 17. As part of the lawsuit — which sought to bar the potential noncitizens from voting in local and statewide elections — Secretary Fontes confirmed that he had identified 97,928 registered voters who had been marked as having provided proof of citizenship as a result of the system flaw, even though they have not done so.
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The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that these voters should be moved to the “Federal-Only” list but should be allowed to remain registered to vote in state and local elections. The ruling also allowed state recorders to continue their investigations into whether names on the list have actually provided proof of citizenship.
AFL filed a public records request on behalf of its client, EZAZ.org, within hours of Richter’s filing on September 17. The request asked Secretary Fontes to produce the full list of every individual who had been unlawfully registered to vote.
“However, Secretary Fontes declined the request through a letter written by his attorney. Rather than treating constituents with respect and decorum, their response was a bombastic tirade that invoked a bizarre conspiracy theory accusing EZAZ.org of secretly planning to harass the voters on the list,” AFL wrote in its press release. “There is, of course, no evidence to support Secretary Fontes’s conspiracy theory, and EZAZ.org has no intention of harassing anyone. Secretary Fontes also feebly claimed that compiling the list would be too hard for his staff. None of these excuses hold water. Fontes’s staff has already compiled the list–that’s how they know the number of affected voters. And there is no risk that these voters will be harassed–EZAZ.org’s mission is all about protecting voters. ”
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On September 30, Fontes conceded that the issue was far more wide-reaching than previously known. Specifically, he claimed to have discovered an additional “new set of approximately 120,000 Arizonans who may be affected by a data coding oversight within ADOT’s Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) and Arizona voter registration databases,” bringing the total of registered voters whose citizenship is in question to 218,000.
Arizona was decided by just 10,457 votes in 2020.
“America First Legal continues to lead the fight for election integrity. We are suing the state of Arizona for refusing to provide the list of 218,000 voters who failed or refused to establish citizenship. It is absolutely imperative that we stop the dire threat of illegal alien voting, which is the gravest form of foreign election interference,” said America First Legal President Stephen Miller after the lawsuit was filed.
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