Nice Time! AZ’s 41k Federal-Only Voters Not Getting Kicked Off Rolls

Amy Comey Barrett's tip check must have bounced.

No treading today! Photo by Michael Jerrard on Unsplash

A big fat L for Trump in Arizona, where polls are teetering on a snakehair!

Those 41,000 federal-only voters the Republican National Committee and Arizona Republicans begged the Supreme Court to EEEK EMERGENCY yoink off of the rolls in Arizona on Tuesday are staying on. Wompedy womp!

Arizona’s been a sweaty chafing thigh for election-conspiracy-theory pushing way before that became mainstream; Republicans there have been fighting the federal “motor voter” law there for the past 20 years. The law lets voters be registered if they swear they’re citizens, but without having to produce documentary proof, like a birth certificate or passport. So that must mean IMMIGRANTS BAMBOO-BALLOT HARVESTING or whatever.

It’s all a pile of hot burro turds, of course. According to the Heritage Foundation itself, out of billions of votes cast since 1979, there have only been 85 cases of suspected non-citizens illegally voting in the whole country. A bit less than the 3 to 5 million that Trump lied that had voted in 2016. And there have been ZERO illegal immigrants uncovered voting in Arizona, for as long as anyone has been keeping track. And boy have they been looking! Though not mentioned in Heritage’s report, Heritage-adjacent TPUSA director and state rep Austin Smith, who was kicked off the ballot for blatantly forging signatures, and somehow has still not stepped down or been charged with forgery, or faced an ethics investigation.

But still, the fraud measures work, and people dumb enough to try it get found out. Signatures and voter-registration rolls are regularly checked against information from other agencies, and the penalty for voting illegally as a non-citizen is deportation, fines and/or prison. Of the 32 cases of “voter fraud” of any kind ever found in Arizona, most were people who attempted to vote twice and got caught, and a handful of felons.

But to disenfranchise voters solve this problem, Arizona created two tiers of voters, who get two different ballots: those who had not shown their proof-of-citizenship papers, who are only allowed to vote in federal elections, and those that have, and get a full ballot. Most of these voters, 54%, are Independents, 27% are registered Democrats, and 15% are Republicans. But disenfranchising thousands of their own potential voters is a risk they’re willing to take!

With Harris currently polling just 1.3 percent ahead of Trump in Arizona, and Biden haven beaten Trump in Arizona by only 10,457 votes in 2020, those tiny little numbers could make a real difference. And that is why the Arizona GOP has been EMERGENCY FREAKING! Just a month ago Trump was winning there, but the tumbleweed has turned.

It’s not all good news, the Supremes still let Arizona’s doofy two-tier system stand, even though lower courts had repeatedly rejected it, and in 2018 the state entered into a consent decree promising to cut their making-voting-burdensome shenanigans out. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch said they would have loved to kick those voters off of the rolls. Voting rights, they’ve never much cared for them. But everybody else, even Amy Comey Barrett, told the Arizona GOP to pound more sand in terms of kicking current voters off the rolls. Though for future registrations, Arizona still can defy the consent decree and do that, which rather sucks. The Court’s order was brief, so we don’t know what Barrett’s reasoning was, but hey, glimmer of hope that her tolerance for voter suppression maybe has some kind of limit, and she’s the one conservative on the court with a sense of shame?

And in other happy news from the Diamondback state, robotic election-denier and Steve Bannon bestie Keri Lake has been consistently behind Reuben Gallego in the polls for a month, even the Republican-slanted one. Wasn’t he great at the DNC?

Arizona also has an abortion rights constitutional amendment on the ballot, which would guarantee the right all the way up to the point of fetal viability. And people are paying attention and fired up after that 1864-abortion-law crazy their court tried to pull. So moisturize those thighs, because the forecast for November is a hot time for turnout! Yippee ky-yay!