Arizona officials race to fix 'clerical error' for voters who haven't proved citizenship
Source: CNN Politics
Published 6:07 PM EDT, Tue September 17, 2024
CNN — Election officials in Arizona are racing to correct a clerical error that could shut out nearly 100,000 voters from casting ballots in state and local races. Officials say a glitch mistakenly marked that these voters had provided documentation proving their citizenship – which is required to vote in state and local races in Arizona – when there’s no record that they had.
Such documentation isn’t required to cast ballots for federal office in Arizona, so the glitch would not affect anyone’s ability to vote in the 2024 presidential election. But it could affect state legislative races and Arizona’s ballot referendum on abortion rights.
Former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have raised baseless concerns claiming that massive numbers of noncitizens have voted in US elections. Nonpartisan experts say illegal voting by noncitizens is extremely rare and is quickly caught.
Officials have described the Arizona situation as a “clerical error” and a “coding glitch” that isn’t part of any organized scheme to undermine the integrity of the 2024 election. “At the end of the day, it was a clerical error that we want to get resolved for the voters,” said Taylor Kinnerup, a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Recorder’s office, which helps run elections in the Phoenix area and discovered the problem earlier this month.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/politics/arizona-citizenship-voting/index.html