Number of Arizonans impacted by glitch threatening voting rights climbs to more than 200,000

A data glitch in Arizona’s voter database has impacted voter registration information for roughly 218,000 people, or roughly one in every 20 voters in the state.

A 20-year-old coding glitch in a state database erroneously marked voters as having provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote, when it was unclear whether they actually did.

That error — discovered within weeks before Election Day, in a battleground state with more than 4 million voters — impacted roughly 79,000 Republicans, 61,000 Democrats, and 76,000 other voters, according to Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

The state’s Supreme Court will allow impacted voters to cast their ballots to avoid mass disenfranchisement with such a limited window for due process as Election Day nears.

Monday’s discovery of a second tranche of impacted voters arrived a little over a week before early voting begins on October 9, and as Donald Trump and his Republican allies demand that all voters provide documented proof of citizenship, teeing up potential GOP challenges to election results in a state that was at the center of bogus election claims and conspiracy theories in 2020.

“The reality is these registrants have met the same legal standard as every other American who registers to vote: swearing under penalty of perjury that they are US citizens,” Fontes said on Monday.

“We can’t risk denying actual citizens the right to vote due to an error out of their control,” he added. “This issue is another example of why we need to fund elections, update systems and staff, and carry forward our proven tradition of safe, fair and secure elections.”

But the disclosure is likely to continue to fuel baseless allegations about widespread noncitizen voting,