Arizona Supreme Court allows 98,000 individuals without confirmed citizenship to vote
The court had to intervene in the matter after a software glitch revealed that authorities did not know whether or not nearly 100,000 voters had U.S. citizenship.
A ballot drop box in Maricopa County, Arizona
Nearly 100,000 individuals will vote in the upcoming election in the state of Arizona without authorities being certain that they are U.S. citizens. This has been decided by the Arizona Supreme Court in a landmark ruling, surrounded by controversy over Republican accusations of a lack of safeguards when it comes to voting.
The court's ruling came after a "coding error" in the state's election software led Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to insist that he would send ballots to those affected by other means.
The database error left the legal status of 98,000 registered voters in Arizona up in the air, affecting people who obtained their driver's license before October 1996 and subsequently received duplicates before registering to vote after 2004.
The situation is all the more serious because Arizona will be one of the key swing states in the upcoming November presidential election. At the moment, estimates give Donald Trump a very tight victory over the Democratic candidate, with just 47.2% for Trump versus 46.8% for Harris in aggregate polling data updated last Thursday by 270win. Polymarket predicts a more narrow Trump win in Arizona.
Despite the threat this poses, Arizona Democrats intend for this situation to go unnoticed heading into future elections. The Arizona secretary of state assured that "this was discovered not because someone was voting illegally and not because someone was trying to vote illegally, as far as we can tell." According to Adrian Fontes in a press conference this week, "it was basic voter roll maintenance, and it showed us that there is this problem."
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