Arizona Found Some ‘Illegal Voters’! Whoops, They’re Mostly Republicans
Arizona Found Some ‘Illegal Voters’! Whoops, They’re Mostly Republicans
Isn’t it ironic? Dontcha think?
Arizona is one of the swingiest swing states of all, and presidential polls have been tighter than a rattlesnake’s cloaca. As of this minute, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are polling neck-and-wattle at 47.2 percent (Trump) to 47.1 (Harris). Harris’s previous one-point lead seems to have eroded there ever since old Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his brain worm slithered away.
So naturally, Arizona’s Republicans have been dialing their voter-suppression efforts up to 11. They’ve been furiously combing voter rolls looking for those ILLEGALS, even though there hasn’t been a single case of a noncitizen voting in Arizona since the Heritage Foundation itself started tracking “election fraud” cases back to 1979.
But guess what, now they found some! Kind of. As it turns out, 97,688 Arizona voters who never proved their citizenship have been getting ballots that they shouldn’t, and most of them are Republicans.
The backstory is, Republicans have been battling the federal “motor voter” law for 20 years, claiming without evidence that it might allow noncitizens to vote. To comply with the letter of the law while taking a dump on its spirit, since 2004 Arizona has had two kinds of voters: those who have proven citizenship with a driver’s license or birth certificate and get full federal and state ballots, and those who haven’t, and get ballots that let them vote in federal elections only.
But as it turns out, some voters who have had driver’s licenses since before October of 1996, then had their licenses replaced, never got flagged as not having shown their papers, but have been getting full ballots anyway. Sure, they swore they were citizens, and have been voting for decades, and if they were noncitizens, the many other security safeguards would have found them out a long time ago. But no papers, no vote!
And as it turns out, this particular bunch of accidental older scofflaws prefers the GOP by a 10 percent margin. Oops!
Lower courts have been rejecting Arizona’s doofy system for years, and last month, the Republican National Committee ran to the Supreme Court, squealing EEK EMERGENCY EMERGENCY, you must please yoink ALL the federal-only voters off of the rolls!
SCOTUS said no to that, thanks to Amy Comey Barrett, of all people. But it let Arizona’s doofy two-level voting system stand.
Now, the (Republican) Maricopa county recorder has run to the (all Republican) Arizona Supreme Court, squealing EEK EMERGENCY EMERGENCY, you must kick these voters off the full-ballot rolls, never mind it’s three days before military and overseas ballots are supposed to be sent out, and less than three weeks before early voting begins! Emergency! And if the Arizona Supreme Court decides that those voters must now get federal-only ballots instead of full ballots, it means those older mostly-Republican voters won’t get to vote on measures like the one to put abortion rights into the state Constitution.
Mightn’t those voters be ever be so surprised when they show up! Let’s see what the Arizona Supreme Court does with this one!
Selina Meyer is not a fictional character.
In Oregon we have an easier way to deal with "illegal" voters. We say, "oops, sorry." Remove the registrations, all 300 of them, and add a confirming step at the DMVs that issued them.