Audio of a conference call earlier this month between Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and Attorney General Kris Mayes obtained by the Washington Post reveals the the three agonizing over what to do after they had found out that circa 98,000 voters in the state had been registered to vote for decades, even though there was no record they had ever provided proof of citizenship as is required under state law – a situation that they were most certainly going to be damned on either way given how it was perfectly formulated to fuel MAGA conspiracy freaks.
The origin of the problem goes back to 2004, when the state passed the proof of citizenship law, leading to nine years of litigation ending with the Supreme Court ruling in 2013 that federal law prevented the state from enforcing it for presidential and congressional elections. The state then implemented a hybrid system where those who had not provided proof were given federal-only ballots that left off local and state races. What happened this month is that the Secretary of State’s office had found that the 98,000 had been erroneously been provided full ballots after 2004. Even better is that federal law prohibits states from making any changes to voter rolls under 90 days before election day, leaving Hobbes, Mayes, and Fontes with a perfect storm of shit.
“When this goes public, it is going to have all of the conspiracy theorists in the world coming back to re-litigate the past three elections, at least in Arizona,” Hobbs said. “And it’s going to validate all of their theories about illegal voting in our elections, even though we all know that’s not true.”