Arizona was a key swing state in the 2020 presidential election, giving Joe Biden a narrow 10,457-vote margin to swing the state into the Democratic Party column.
Arizona lawmakers, in 2022, passed a law, authored by State Rep. Jake Hoffman in coordination with the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Donald Trump’s Project 2025, that would block anyone who hasn’t provided proof of citizenship from casting a ballot in this year’s presidential race.
Seems logical on the surface, except that a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, doesn’t require people registering to vote to submit proof of citizenship, instead just mandating that voters attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.
A federal appeals court on Aug. 1 overturned a lower-court decision upholding the state law, meaning the 41,000 Arizonans who registered to vote using a form authorized by the National Voter Registration Act are eligible to vote in the 2024 elections.
A group of Republican state AGs, including Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, wants to take the vote away from those 41,000 Arizona residents.
“It should be easy to vote and hard to cheat. Requiring proof of citizenship before registering to vote is a common-sense measure that helps to preserve the integrity of the American electoral process,” Miyares said in a press release from his office on Monday, announcing that he has joined the partisan coalition, which has filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asserting that the NVRA does not prohibit states from verifying the citizenship of voters.
The problem with their argument: a 2013 Supreme Court decision that specifically ordered Arizona to “accept the federal form as a complete and sufficient registration,” in effect, to accept the primacy of the NVRA to state election law.
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Chris Graham
