The legal battle over the 2024 elections is well underway. The MAGA shenanigans of the Georgia Election Commission are overshadowing disturbing developments in Arizona. Last week, the Supreme Court signaled its willingness to revisit an issue settled over a decade ago, allowing Arizona’s new law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote to go into effect. By taking up the issue again at the last minute, after registration has opened, the justices are stoking the false public sentiment that non-citizens are a threat to US elections. This is the latest sign that the justices may be in league with former President Donald Trump and ready to interfere in elections unless they are decided by a margin too large to tamper with.
This incident Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia VotaIn 2019, the Republican National Committee requested last-minute “emergency” changes to Arizona’s voter registration law, even though the state’s mail-in ballot registration period has already begun. The lawsuit strikes at the heart of voting rights and fair elections. Not only is the RNC trying to block tens of thousands of Arizona voters from voting legally, it is spreading the hoax that foreigners are voting in U.S. elections. As the libertarian Cato Institute has noted, “there is no credible evidence that foreigners have voted illegally in sufficient numbers to actually change the outcome of an election.” This Supreme Court intervention is wrong, and the stakes are extremely high. Joe Biden won Arizona by just 10,457 votes in 2020, and it’s unclear what impact the Supreme Court’s new ruling in November will have.
An unsigned court order is Republican National Committee The case will enforce an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, a strong indication that when the Supreme Court’s conservative wing (three of whom are Trump appointees) ultimately hears the case, they will strike down as unconstitutional parts of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, a landmark federal voting rights law once defended by Justice Antonin Scalia.
In that case, the Court granted the Republican National Committee’s request to enact a law requiring proof of citizenship for all new registrations, but refused to allow a separate law to remove 42,301 voters who were already registered without documents, although Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch would have allowed the latter as well.
And the threat isn’t over yet, because the courts have another opportunity to intervene in Arizona’s voter rolls. For example, Trump policy maker Stephen Miller and his America First group filed a lawsuit just a few weeks ago in Maricopa County, seeking to turn over the names of undocumented registered voters to the Department of Homeland Security and the state attorney general, and to force the county recorder to “conduct roll management.”
While Miller’s lawsuit may not go anywhere (and hopefully it will), court intervention during election season could change the course of the election, even if the law only applies to future registrants. Voter registration has surged in the wake of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, with nonpartisan registration group Vote.org reporting that just two days after Biden’s announcement, there were tens of thousands of new registrations nationwide, 83 percent of whom were under the age of 34. While data for Arizona is not yet available, the trend continues in battleground states across the country. With the registration period already well underway, the court’s new ruling means that information previously provided to potential voters to verify their eligibility to vote is no longer accurate. This further exacerbates problems with existing registrations in Arizona. In Arizona, the registrations of more than 20,000 residents were withheld (many due to inconsequential technical errors) in the July primary election well before the court’s ruling.
How did we get to this point? Thirty years ago, at a time when voting rights had bipartisan support, Congress passed the NVRA to standardize voter registration procedures across the country. To do so, Congress created a national registration application that required applicants to swear, under penalty of perjury, that they were U.S. citizens, but did not require voters to provide any additional supporting documentation. But a decade later, in 2004, Arizona enacted Proposition 200, requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote.
The Supreme Court said in 2013 that Arizona couldn’t do that. In a 7-2 decision written by Justice Scalia and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held that the federal NVRA superseded Arizona’s conflicting documents requirements because “Congress’s power over the ‘time, place and manner’ of congressional elections is ‘supreme and may be exercised at any time and to the extent it deems appropriate.'”
Arizona already requires proof of citizenship to vote in state elections, and nearly all Arizona voters provide it, but there are thousands of “federal-only” voters in Arizona who have not provided any additional documentation, many of whom register at polling places on college campuses (and so are likely to be college students without driver’s licenses, not aliens who are ineligible to vote).
Emboldened by a partisan climate that seeks to dismantle constitutional norms and the rule of law, the Arizona Republican Party passed a bill seeking to reimpose the citizenship documentation requirement in federal elections in 2022, clearly at odds with the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling, which explained that the NVRA “prohibits Arizona from requiring applicants of federal forms to submit more information than is required by the form itself.” In an era when legal precedents do not stand in the way of the courts’ ideological aims, the Republican National Committee’s latest attempt appears to have been successful. Last week’s court order will put into effect Arizona’s new law requiring all new registrants to submit documentary proof of citizenship. And a full review of the case, expected next year, could result in a review of the status of more than 40,000 already registered voters.
To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s conservative wing has overturned the ruling here with blinding hypocrisy. In the 2020 election, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were the so-called Parcel The principle represents the idea that federal courts shouldn’t interfere with state voting laws as an election approaches. The court’s last-minute changes to the election rules could make a difference in November. Not all undocumented voters vote Democrat, but many do. They include college students who leave their homes and don’t have the papers required by Arizona’s new law. Harris leads Trump by 9 points among registered voters ages 18-29 in battleground states.
Beyond the old tactics of voter suppression, the RNC’s purpose in bringing this lawsuit so close to the election is clearly to act as a psyop to sow doubt in the presidential election by reviving conspiracy theories, already debunked, about foreign voters deciding the election outcome. And the RNC is not alone: 24 states have written amicus briefs in support of Arizona, alleging that “foreigners are illegally voting in the election,” enough to help Obama win North Carolina in 2008. To support these claims, the states cite a single study that is deeply methodologically flawed and has been widely debunked, and whose author has long lamented that his work was thus distorted.
Contrary to conspiracy theories, there are many innocent reasons why people don’t have proof of citizenship, related to income level. Extensive research has demonstrated that about 9% of voting-age citizens “don’t have a valid driver’s license,” while “another 12% (28.6 million people) have a valid license but it doesn’t list their current address and current name.” The same research also found that “low-income people tend to think that they don’t need a photo ID to vote in person, or are unsure.” Citizens may not have access to their documents, either because they are stored in a bank safe deposit box or because they are lost or stolen during a move or hardship period. That’s why the NVRA’s oath requirement works so well: it allows people without easy access to the proper documents to vote, while increasing the fear of criminal penalties if they lie.
Arizona’s regulations are not only burdensome, they’re unnecessary. States already have many safeguards in place to keep non-citizens off the voter rolls and from voting. For example, states can cross-reference state DMV records, jury duty records, and Social Security records to ensure that non-citizens are not registered. Vote.
