By Jim Small | AZ Mirror
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that roughly 97,000 voters who are improperly registered to vote because of a glitch in the state’s driver’s license database won’t be limited on who they can vote for in November because no law authorizes county recorders to change their registration status.
The voters are erroneously registered to vote because of the way the Motor Vehicle Division provides driver’s license information to the state’s voter registration system. The voters affected by this particular coding error are people who first obtained their Arizona driver’s license before October 1996 and then were issued a duplicate replacement before registering to vote sometime after 2004.
Since 2005, Arizona has required all voters to prove their citizenship when they register. But a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling bars the state from barring any person who registers to vote without such proof, but swears they are a citizen, from voting in federal races. So, there is a small class of voters known as “federal only,” who are only allowed to cast ballots on national races, like president and Congress.
