A federal judge upheld a group of new Arizona laws, which would require registered voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship for their votes to be counted.
Arizona legislators were accused of discrimination after they adopted the laws, which requires counties to verify the status of registered voters. However, in a Thursday ruling, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled that such requirements are not discriminatory and that the state has an interest in preventing voter fraud and limiting voting to those individuals eligible to vote.
“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),” the judge wrote.
In the ruling, Bolton clarified that asking individuals to include their state or country of birth on a state registration form, one requirement laid out within the laws, is a violation of the Civil Rights act and a section of the National Voter Registration Act.
The judge said that county officials requesting the state or country of birth, would likely result in county recorders’ falsely believing that a naturalized individual is a noncitizen.
One of the measures examined by Bolton included a requirement of state election officials to cross-check registration information with government databases to prove their citizenship and report any nonregistered individual who attempts to vote to prosecutors.
“The court finds that though it may occur, non-citizens voting in Arizona is quite rare, and non-citizen voter fraud in Arizona is rarer still,” the ruling states. “But while the voting laws are not likely to meaningfully reduce possible non-citizen voting in Arizona, they could help to prevent non-citizens from registering or voting.”
The ruling comes after testimony from a 2023 trial, where experts testified about Arizona’s history of voting discrimination, which included literacy tests that effectively blocked Native American and Latino voters from participating, along with voter roll purges.
Bolton argued that past attempts to exclude voters were irrelevant to current attempts to prevent voter fraud, noting that no evidence was presented by the plaintiffs to reflect an intent by lawmakers to suppress voter registrations.
