By Staff Reporter |
Reports have emerged that voters may have had their registration addresses moved by Arizona’s Motor Vehicles Division (MVD) without their consent, potentially jeopardizing their ability to vote.
Such unintended disenfranchisement occurred for thousands of voters in the 2022 midterm election.
The renewed concern for the eligibility of an untold number of legal voters emerged after GOP congressional candidate Abraham Hamadeh’s counsel, Jen Wright, brought up their discovery from earlier this year that the MVD moved the voter registration address for thousands of voters without their consent.
State Senator Wendy Rogers, a Republican, attested that MVD had moved the registration address for one of her family members.
Wright was referencing the Hamadeh v. Mayes case, which the Arizona Court of Appeals decided in April.
In that case, Hamadeh’s counsel explained that they discovered voters who owned other properties in addition to their primary residence and found themselves disenfranchised.
“[A]fter interviewing hundreds of those voters, we found that many are voters who have connections to properties outside of their home county; and due to no fault of their own, but instead changes to the statewide computer system, their registration was moved from their county of residence to the county where they had some connection without the voter’s express knowledge, consent or intent in a way that lacks a requisite procedural due process requirement necessitated before depriving someone of their sacred right to vote,” stated counsel. “[I]t appears that more than 1,100 election day provisional voters were, we believe, wrongly disenfranchised. Turns out, with many of these declarations we have their voting record and history, and we can see when and how it was changed, and it was not by their own intent; and we know their intent because they did not show up to vote in the secondary county that was assigned to them.”
The MVD process that impacted those 1,100 voters went into place in April 2020. The court of appeals said that those Arizonans’ votes still couldn’t count since their registrations reflected an address outside the precinct they attempted to vote in, regardless of the change being made by MVD without the knowledge or consent of the voters.
“[E]ven if voters cast provisional ballots in the wrong precinct because of the alleged faulty but unchallenged election procedure, the voters still were not registered to vote in the precincts where they cast those provisional ballots,” stated the court. “Arizona law simply does not authorize opening the envelopes and counting those ballots.”
This hasn’t been the only case recently in which MVD interactions jeopardized Arizonans’ right to vote.
Last month, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that nearly 100,000 longtime Arizona voters caught up in an MVD coding error were allowed to vote, despite a challenge from Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who put the blame on voters and asked that they be limited to voting a federal ballot only.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that those voters were eligible to vote. Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer ruled that the fault was with the state, not the voters, for their registration changing.
“[A] state administrative failure permitted the Affected Voters to be registered without confirming that they provided DPOC when they received their driver’s licenses and where there is so little time remaining before the beginning of the 2024 General Election,” said Timmer.
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