Ducey signed bill that may force certain longtime voters to prove they are citizens

The Great Arizona Voter Purge rages on, as our leaders continue their temper tantrum over Donald Trump’s loss.

This time, it appears they could be going after hundreds of thousands of Arizona’s oldest voters, people who’ve been casting ballots in the state for decades.

If you registered to vote in Arizona before 2004 and never provided proof that you're a U.S. citizen -- a number that includes close to 200,000 voters who got their driver's licenses before Oct. 1, 1996, in the days before proof of citizenship was required -- you, too, could be suspect.

In the eyes of the GOP-run Arizona Legislature, that is.

Attorneys say the bill is likely unconstitutional

Doesn’t matter that legislative attorneys in both the House and Senate warned our leaders that the bill violates federal law. Doesn’t matter that the state will have to spend millions of dollars to defend it from the inevitable lawsuit.

Doesn’t even seem to matter that it may disenfranchise a sizable number of long-time voters unless they can now prove their citizenship. 

House Bill 2492 passed the House and Senate on party-line votes and Gov. Doug Ducey signed it on Wednesday, proclaiming that no longtime Arizona voters will have to prove they are citizens, as some election activists and county election officials warn.

As if his word is law.

This bill comes to you courtesy of Rep. Jake Hoffman, a Queen Creek Republican who assures us that his proposal is “an incredibly well-crafted piece of legislation” that won’t disenfranchise anyone who is legally entitled to vote. 

“This bill does nothing other than to ensure that non-citizens are not voting in Arizona elections and American elections,” he said, in pushing the bill through the House.

You’ll excuse me if I find it difficult to take his assurances at face value.

Hoffman is casting doubt on long-running voters

Hoffman is the hard-right first-term legislator best known for running a disinformation campaign aimed at getting Donald Trump re-elected in 2020. He hired teens to post conservative talking points and baseless conspiracy theories on social media, casting doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots and trumpeting the baseless claim that 28 million of them have gone missing in the past four elections.

He went on to become one of the state's fake electors, signing a documenting falsely avowing that Donald Trump won Arizona.

Now his bill casts doubt about some of Arizona’s longest running voters.

His HB 2492 would require election officials to verify the citizenship of anyone who registered to vote using a federal form that requires only that you avow – but not prove – that you are a citizen.

His bill may be aimed at Arizona's 31,000 “federal-only” voters, the ones who cannot vote in state elections but are entitled to cast a ballot for president and Congress. But some elections activists and a lobbyist for Arizona's counties contend his bill also may send longtime voters scrambling to prove they really are citizens.

In 2004, voters adopted a proof-of-citizen requirement to register to vote but they specifically exempted anyone who was already registered so as not to disenfranchise boatloads of voters.

Voters could be purged until they prove citizenship

Ducey contends HB 2492 does not impact Arizonans who registered to vote before 2004 because Prop. 200 contained a "safe harbor" provision, exempting them from the proof-of-citizenship requirement.

But Tom Collins, executive director of the Citizens Clean Elections Commission, told Capitol Media Services’ Howard Fischer that Hoffman’s vaguely worded bill does not appear to grandfather in those long-established voters.

Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, agreed.

"We believe the governor is mistaken because of the new definition of qualified elector," she told me;.

Marson said people who registered before 2005 and never moved or adjusted their voter registration could find themselves purged from the voter rolls unless they can prove they are citizens.

That would include as many as 192,000 Arizonans who have pre-1996 driver's licenses

The bill requires county elections workers to sift through voter lists and check those who haven't proven their citizenship against sometimes-unreliable citizenship databases, purging those whose birth places cannot be verified and sending those registrations to the attorney general for investigation and possible criminal prosecution.

Both House and Senate attorneys have advised the Legislature that the bill violates the National Voter Registration Act. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court already has said so.

In a 2013 decision, the high court ruled that while Arizona can demand proof of citizenship from those wanting to vote in state and local elections, it cannot supercede federal law, which requires only an avowal of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

None of which mattered a whit to Hoffman or his fellow Republican legislators, who went on to the pass the bill anyway and send it to the governor.

It would even bar voters who haven’t provided proof of citizenship from voting in presidential elections or from getting an early ballot. They still could go to the polls to vote in congressional elections.

Most likely, this is just a witch hunt

Hoffman contends they would have no right to cast votes for president, because the Constitution gives state legislators the authority to decide how presidential electors are chosen. (An authority that the Arizona Legislature long ago gave to voters.)

Hoffman insists his bill is constitutional and will root out foreigners who seek to influence our elections.

“HB 2492 is an incredibly well-crafted piece of legislation that is on sound legal footing and broadly supported by voters of all political parties,” he told Fischer. Nor is he worried about litigation. “I am confident that should Democrats challenge HB 2492 in court it will only serve to further reinforce its clear constitutionality.”

And I am confident that taxpayers will be shelling out a few million dollars defending this unconstitutional witch hunt.

All because Hoffman is upset that Arizona has just over 10,000 federal-only voters, approximately the same number as Biden's margin of victory in Arizona. The odds that every one of those voters is a non-citizen who  voted for Biden and thus stole the election from Trump seems a stretch.

But hey, don’t let that get in the way of logic or the Constitution.

Or the rights of up to 200,000 longtime Arizonans who suddenly may find themselves scrambling to hang onto their vote.

Reach Roberts at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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