Trump And His Friends Seize On Arizona Voter Registration Error As Conspiracy Theory Fodder

Earlier this month, Maricopa County election officials detected an error in Arizona’s voter registration system, which has jeopardized tens of thousands of registered voters’ ability to vote full ballot in the upcoming election. 

While the error did not impact registration for voting in federal elections, it doesn’t matter to some — the fact of the error has, unsurprisingly, given Donald Trump, his allies and conspiracy theorists fodder to continue fear mongering over the  myth of non-citizens voting in federal elections and calling into question the integrity of the upcoming election. 

In short, the problem in Arizona is complicated and almost entirely unrelated to the conspiracy theories Republicans have been spreading this cycle. Since 2004, proof of citizenship has been required to vote in Arizona state and local elections. According to the 2004 law, a driver’s license that was issued after October 1, 1996 can be submitted as proof of citizenship. Voters who do not provide documentary proof of citizenship are registered as “federal-only” voters and are only eligible to vote in federal elections. But due to a data coding error in the Arizona Motor Vehicle Department’s system, around 97,000 people who received licenses prior to 1996, have been incorrectly marked as having provided documentary proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections before it became a requirement for voter registration. 

Immediately after the error was discovered, Donald Trump and right-wing media seized on the muddiness of the situation as proof of their false narrative: that non-citizens are indeed voting in elections and that the election is somehow being rigged for Democrats. 

The error, though, does not change the fact that non-citizen voting en masse in federal elections is simply not happening in Arizona, or anywhere else in the country. 

“There’s just absolutely no basis for believing that any of these people in Arizona or people nationwide aren’t citizens who are fully eligible,” Brent Ferguson, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told TPM in an interview. “There’s tons of evidence showing that our elections in general are secure and reach the right result.”

But, as is often the case with the MAGA brand of conspiracy theories, facts are of little significance when there’s an election to delegitimize. 

In a post on Truth Social, following the news, Trump shared an article about the error, writing simply: “Trying to Rig the Election!” 

Soon, X was ablaze with several viral posts from Trump supporters and Big Lie enthusiasts about the supposed Arizona “conspiracy.”

And a headline from right-wing media company, Just the News, headlined a story on the error, egregiously mischaracterizing the issue, as follows: “Arizona admits that nearly 100,000 non-citizen ‘voters’ wrongly listed on voter rolls amid lawsuit.”

Any attempt to perpetuate the false narrative that non-citizen voting is a real issue is, as Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Law School, described it, merely a way to “foster panic by shouting about a topic that seems to have people concerned because it plays into extremely old, very disturbing tropes about they and us that have always been used to scapegoat immigrants without reason.”

There is simply no evidence that the voters who were impacted by this technical error are not U.S. citizens. As Mark Kokanovich, a former federal prosecutor in Arizona and attorney at Ballard Spahr, emphasized to TPM, it’s also likely that all of the people impacted are actually citizens because non-citizens have little incentive to vote illegally. 

“The number of non-citizens in there is going to be de minimis because noncitizens don’t try to vote because that’s the dumbest crime you could ever commit,” he said. “There’s no reward in it.” 

“The people who are the misinformation peddlers, they can take whatever extrapolation they want from that and just tell their people that these are non-citizen voters, because the absence of facts to them is evidence,” said Garrett Archer, data analyst at ABC15 in Phoenix and former senior elections analyst at the Arizona secretary of state’s office, similarly told TPM. 

Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs said in a press release this week that her team has “identified and fixed an administrative error that originated in 2004” after the error was brought to her attention by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. 

Richer has also filed a lawsuit this week requesting that the state Supreme Court designate those almost 100,000 voters as “federal-only” voters, barring them from voting in state and local races. He did, however, acknowledge that a majority of these voters likely can provide documentary proof of citizenship. But, Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is asking the court to allow the impacted voters to be able to vote in both federal and state races, saying in a press conference on Tuesday that he has “no reason to believe that there are any significant numbers of individuals remaining on this list who are not eligible to vote.”

Fontes also noted that the majority of those impacted are Republicans, which may, in part, explain why the state GOP Senate President and House Speaker are in agreement with Fontes, and have submitted an amicus brief to the Arizona Supreme Court asking that these voters be allowed access to full ballots in the November election.