A federal judge on Thursday acknowledged Arizona’s interest in keeping its voter rolls free of noncitizens, while simultaneously hampering laws designed to do just that.
“Considering the evidence as a whole, the court concludes that Arizona’s interests in preventing non-citizens from voting and promoting public confidence in Arizona’s elections outweighs the limited burden voters might encounter when required to provide” documentary proof of citizenship, wrote U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, disagreeing with the attempt by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to paint Arizona election integrity laws as “discriminatory.”
But at the same time, Bolton struck down or handicapped a handful of Arizona laws designed to ensure that only Arizona citizens are on the state’s voter rolls, including a provision of H.B. 2243 that directed county recorders who have “reason to believe” voters are not citizens to investigate, and potentially remove, those individuals from the voter rolls.
The state law required the county recorder to compare persons “who are registered to vote in that county and who the county recorder has reason to believe are not United States citizens and persons who are register to vote without satisfactory evidence of citizenship as prescribed by Section 16-166 with the [SAVE] Program maintained by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to verify the citizenship status of the persons registered.”
Bolton ruled that because the SAVE database only covers naturalized citizens rather than native-born citizens, it violates the National Voter Registration Act and Civil Rights Act. Arizona may, however, still investigate “registered voters
