Audit shows extent of Arizona’s problems with tracking voter citizenship

2025/02/03 Leave a comment

Case study:

The report laid out for the first time the extent of the state’s problem with tracking voter citizenship. And it confirmed, as Votebeat found in October, that it didn’t simply stem from a glitch in the coding of the system, as officials initially announced.

Hobbs ordered the comprehensive review of state policies in September after officials found that a problem with the system allowed more than 200,000 voters to be registered to vote full ballots, even though they had never been asked to provide proof of citizenship. In Arizona, only people who have provided citizenship proof can vote in state and local elections.

Hobbs hired two former recorders, Patty Hansen of Coconino County and Robyn Stallworth-Pouquette of Yuma County, to review MVD policies and practices relevant to voter registration. The two reported their findings to the MVD, which compiled the report.

The report included three main findings.

First, the report found a loophole in state law involving people born in American Samoa and Swains Islands who have not become naturalized citizens. Those people are considered U.S. nationals, and can get a U.S. passport, but they are not citizens with full rights.

But Arizona accepts U.S. passports as proof of citizenship for voting, the audit found, so this loophole improperly makes it possible for U.S. nationals to register to vote. The report indicates that there is no way of knowing if any nationals registered to vote using a passport, but emphasizes that this probably happened rarely — if at all — because registrants also must attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury.

Fixing the loophole would require a change to state law to ensure that proper documentation is used that verifies citizenship for U.S. nationals.

A second finding was that the Secretary of State’s Office and Motor Vehicle Division must communicate better. The secretary’s office maintains the voter registration database for 13 of 15 counties. When county recorders check the citizenship status of a new registrant, they use that system to query Motor Vehicle Division information.

The two agencies have already begun meeting more frequently, and, under a recommendation from Hansen and Stallworth-Pouquette, election officials will begin receiving training when they receive their election officer certification on how the MVD system functions, the report states.

“Finding regular time to share information and build relationships between the MVD and election officials will help eliminate issues in the future,” the report states.

The last recommendation from the former recorders involves ensuring that inactive MVD records have updated citizenship statuses. Those are for residents whose licenses are expired or canceled. When the secretary’s office and Motor Vehicle Division attempted to find all voters that might have inaccurate citizenship information, they did not check these records.

Report outlines MVD policy problems

County recorders rely heavily on driver’s license information to check citizenship status when someone tries to register to vote. Only driver’s licenses issued after October 1996 count as proof of citizenship, since that’s when the state started collecting citizenship information for normal driver’s licenses.

But the report explained that since 2020, when the MVD updated its driver’s license database, the MVD has classified any resident with a driver’s license issued before October 1996 as a citizen, even though the state hadn’t asked for documentation. That means, if a county recorder looked up their information, those drivers would be classified as citizens, even though there was no proof on record.

But even before 2020 — all the way back to 2007 — there was another problem causing recorders to get inaccurate information about citizenship during these checks. That’s because the secretary’s system was set up to gather just the issuance date of the driver’s license as an indicator of citizenship verification. That issuance date in the records was often incorrect — if the voter had renewed or gotten a duplicate license after 1996, it would show the most recent issuance date. That signaled to the recorders that the voter had provided citizenship proof, even if they hadn’t.

The voter registration system was supposed to provide further information on each license, such as each subsequent issuance date, but because of an error in the system, it did not, according to the report.

Also, the assumption that the MVD was collecting citizenship information when someone renewed their license proved to be not true. MVD told Votebeat in October that it changed that policy.

State officials have now updated state databases to ensure county officials receive accurate information about resident’s citizenship. But Hobbs wanted to look further to see if there were other improvements needed.

County recorders were recently sent the final list of voters affected by the problem. With local elections approaching in some counties, recorders will need to quickly notify the affected voters that they are required to provide proof of citizenship before voting.

Source: Audit shows extent of Arizona’s problems with tracking voter citizenship

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SCOTUS ruling on citizenship proof for new voters has an outsized impact for Native voters

2024/09/06 Leave a comment

Interesting wrinkle:

With the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that now requires potential voters to provide proof of citizenship with their state-created voter registration forms, Indigenous voting rights advocates want Indigenous people to know that they can still register to vote as tribal citizens.

Patty Ferguson-Bohnee said that Indigenous people living in Arizona who are enrolled in a federally recognized tribe can use their tribal identification numbers to prove their citizenship.

“As long as a tribal member is an enrolled member of their tribe, they can use that tribal ID number to register on the state form, and that will prove citizenship for purposes of voter registration,” she said, adding that it’s because all Indigenous peoples were declared citizens of the United States in 1924.

Ferguson-Bohnee is the Director of the Indian Legal Clinic and a Clinical Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. She also coordinates the Arizona Native Vote Election Protect Project, which focuses on protecting the right to vote for Indigenous voters in Arizona.

“If you prove you’re a Native American through using your enrollment number, your citizenship is verified,” she said because there is a space for Indigenous peoples to include that specific information on the state voter registration form.

“The people who are registering voters need to know that we can’t leave that blank because if you do not provide that on your state form, they will reject it,” Ferguson-Bohnee added.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Aug. 22 that Arizona can enforce part of a voter registration law being challenged in federal court, allowing the state to bar legal voters from registering weeks before the election.

Ferguson-Bohnee said the law will cause some confusion among organizations and people out in the community trying to register voters, and it may discourage voters from registering.

“The goal of the law was to create barriers to the ballot box,” she said. “And even to prevent eligible voters from registering to vote.”

Lower courts initially blocked the Arizona law in 2022, but in a 5-4 order, the Supreme Court reinstated a portion of the law that allows the state to stop accepting state-created voter registration forms from Arizona residents unless they provide proof of citizenship.

The ruling means that potential voters who register to vote in Arizona using the state-created voter registration forms will need documentation proving citizenship for the registration to be valid. If no proof is provided, the state will reject the form — without informing them.

Ferguson Bohnee said there is no option to correct the form once it gets rejected, so she suggests that people register with the federal forms first. Then, when they have all the documentation readily available, their registration can be promoted to full-ballot voters.

“It’s very discouraging because it’s making a change right in the midst of the election process when people are registering people to vote,” Ferguson-Bohnee said. “This decision by the court is revising the playing field for election law.”

Not all Indigenous peoples may have their enrollment numbers available, but that shouldn’t discourage them from trying to register to vote. Ferguson-Bohnee said that is when they should register using the federal voter registration form.

She said that registering with a federal form only requires people to affirm their citizenship, not provide document proof, so people will be registered to vote in federal elections, including the presidential and senate races.

However, Ferguson-Bohnee said that if the voter can provide documentary proof of citizenship later, their status will be moved to a full ballot voter, which includes state elections — but that has to be done the Thursday before Election Day.

The court ruling has left some voting organizations baffled about their best course of action because it disrupts the plan of action that has been in motion within Indigenous communities for months.

Arizona Native Vote Executive Director Jaynie Parrish said it has left her team in limbo.

“We’re waiting to hear more directions on what our team needs to do,” Parrish said, adding they haven’t been provided a clear path forward on how this impacts Indigenous voters in Arizona.

Source: SCOTUS ruling on citizenship proof for new voters has an outsized impact for Native voters

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Far fewer unauthorized immigrants living in Arizona cities than 10 years ago, Pew says

2019/03/13 Leave a comment

Interesting mix of factors, ranging from increased enforcement to improved economic circumstances in Mexico:

There are a lot fewer unauthorized immigrants living in key Arizona metropolitan areas than a decade ago, the Pew Research Center says.

New figures Monday show there were about 210,000 undocumented immigrants in the Phoenix metro area in 2016, the most recent estimates available. That compares with about 400,000 in 2007, though there is a margin for error.

Only the New York City and Los Angeles areas had a larger drop, though both decreases were smaller on a percentage basis.

It’s not just Phoenix reflecting the decline.

Tucson’s unauthorized immigrant population dropped about 25 percent, from 50,000 to 35,000.

The latest estimate for Yuma is 15,000 immigrants without documents, which may be a drop of about 5,000, though with the smaller numbers Pew reports the margin of error makes the accuracy less clear.

For the Prescott area, Pew reports that the number of unauthorized immigrants in 2016 may have been anywhere from 25 to 50 percent smaller than the 10,000 living there in 2007.

Pew researcher Jeff Passel said the reductions may partly be due to the change in immigration patterns from other countries.

“We know there’s been a significant drop in Mexican unauthorized immigrants over that decade,” he said.

“And Arizona’s unauthorized immigrant population is largely Mexicans,” Passel continued. “The fact that many fewer Mexican immigrants are coming into the country and more are leaving than coming is a big factor behind this.”

Some research suggests policies adopted by Arizona lawmakers also may be a factor, Passel said.

For example, Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, looked at the requirement for employers here to use the federal E-Verify system.

That requirement is part of a 2007 law, formally known as the Legal Arizona Worker Act.

It allows a state judge to suspend all business licenses of any firm found guilty of knowingly hiring those not in the country legally. A second offense within three years puts the company out of business.

Another part of that law spells out that employers must use the online system to determine whether new employees are legally entitled to work here.

There is no penalty for failing to make the checks. But those who use E-Verify have a legal defense against charges they knowingly broke the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-3 decision in 2011, upheld the Arizona law, rejecting arguments by the business community, Hispanic-rights organizations and the Obama administration that it infringes on the exclusive right of the federal government to regulate immigration.

“The work that we found on E-Verify found that it actually has a significant impact on the wages of likely undocumented workers,” Orrenius said, with a specific finding of an 8 percent reduction in hourly wages.

But Orrenius said there also are larger issues at work, including an improved economy in Mexico and the changing demographics there.

Orrenius said the age of most migrants for economic purposes is between 18 and 24. As the number of people in that age segment decreases, she said, there are fewer to emigrate to the United States.

She had no specific studies on the effect that Arizona’s SB 1070 had in reducing the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the state.

That 2010 law contained several provisions aimed at illegal immigration. While some were struck down by federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court did give the go-ahead for Arizona to require that police ask the immigration status of those they stop if they have reason to suspect they are undocumented.

The Pew study also finds mixed results across the country.

Overall, the report says the unauthorized population in the United States dropped from about 12.2 million in 2007 to 10.7 million in 2016.

While most of the metro areas showed a decline or no significant change, there were a few areas with increases.

Most notable is the Washington, D.C., area where the number of people not in this country legally is estimated to have increased by 100,000 between 2007 and 2016, to 425,000.

Source: Far fewer unauthorized immigrants living in Arizona cities than 10 years ago, Pew says

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Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

Interesting study comparing attitudes in New Mexico and Arizona:

Immigration policy in the US has grown increasingly contentious, seemingly pitting different communities and ideologies against each other. But a new study suggests that a large majority of Americans appreciate a welcoming policy toward immigrants. Only a specific minority—white conservatives—generally feels otherwise. And the effect isn’t limited to policy, as it influenced whether citizens felt welcome in the place that they lived.

The research, performed by a collaboration of US-based researchers, focused on New Mexico and Arizona. These states have similar demographics but radically different policies toward immigrants. Arizona has state policies that encourage police to check the immigration status of people they encounter; controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio ended up in trouble with the court system in part due to how aggressively he pursued this program. New Mexico, by contrast, will provide state IDs and tuition benefits to immigrants regardless of their documentation status.

The researchers reasoned that these states would provide a reasonable test as to how immigration policies align with the feelings of the public. So they surveyed nearly 2,000 residents of the two states, including immigrants, naturalized US citizens, and people born in the US, focusing on the states’ Caucasian and Hispanic populations.

The work used a phone-based survey that suggested that the state’s representatives were considering new immigration-focused legislation. Participants were randomly given a description of one of two types of legislation, either pro- or anti-immigrant (examples included English-only laws and bilingual state documents). Those surveyed were asked how they felt about the proposed legislation but were also asked questions about how they felt about the state—whether they felt at home there and whether they intended to move elsewhere. The intent was to get at whether immigration-focused policies in a state made people feel more or less at home.

Perhaps the clearest and most striking result is that the state where the participant resided didn’t have a significant effect on the main findings. That’s quite striking, given that state policy should in theory represent the desires of its citizens.

Beyond that, people responded to the proposals as you’d expect. Foreign-born Hispanics, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, viewed the immigrant-hostile legislation negatively and felt positively about the immigrant-friendly proposal. Hispanics born in the US were similar, but ideology seemed to creep in as an influence: conservatives were more likely to view the hostile legislation favorably. Liberal whites also strongly favored the pro-immigration proposal, while moderates were nearly evenly split. White conservatives, however, were the only group that on average favored an anti-immigration measure.

A nearly identical pattern emerged when the researchers analyzed how the proposals influenced people’s sense of being welcomed into the community. Foreign-born Hispanics uniformly felt more welcome when primed with immigrant-friendly proposals, as did liberal and moderate native-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic liberals. Conservative native-born Hispanics and moderate whites had a mixed response, while conservative Caucasians were the only group that clearly felt less welcome in their community when told that the legislature was considering a pro-immigration policy.

It’s not much of a surprise to see confirmation that policies that are hostile to a group make members of that group feel less welcome in their communities. In this case, the non-immigrant Hispanics surveyed shared a geographic origin and likely some culture with the people targeted, so it’s not much of a surprise that they felt less welcome as well. It would be useful to perform a similar experiment in New York City or Northern California, where there are more diverse groups of immigrants, to see if these feelings crossed cultural boundaries.

But there was at least one case in this study where the feelings clearly did cross cultural boundaries: liberal Caucasians felt more at home in their communities if they felt the communities welcomed immigrants.

White conservatives, however, were unique in this study in that they were the only group who felt that an immigrant-friendly community was hostile to them. While that might not be a problem in the more homogeneous areas of the country, this group is a shrinking minority—which may both explain the response and suggest that it will become an increasing issue going forward. Finding a way to moderate this sense of hostility may thus be essential to keeping US society functional in the face of demographic change.

Source: Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

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