PHOENIX — A Florida-based organization contends there are 1.2 million ineligible people on Arizona voter registration rolls.
In a new lawsuit, attorneys for Citizen AG say their calculations show more than 1.6 million registered voters did not vote in the last two elections. They said those voters also did not respond to notices that election officials are legally required to send to find out if they are still eligible. The lawsuit claims that means they are dead or have moved.
Attorneys for the organization acknowledged that 432,498 voters were removed following the 2022 midterm election.
That still leaves the question of those remaining 1.2 million, they said.
Citizen AG is asking a federal judge to force Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to respond to its demand for public records about what has been done to maintain the voter registration rolls.
That information is required to be made available under the National Voter Registration Act, they said. But they told the judge, Steven Logan, the only response they got from Fontes’ office is that it has no records responsive to the group’s request.
Citizen AG wants the judge to do more than order Fontes to provide the documents.
It wants Logan to order Fontes to immediately remove — or direct county election officials to remove — from the voter rolls anyone who did not respond to a confirmation notice and did not vote in either of the last two elections.
And if that’s not possible, they want those on the list to be allowed to vote only a “provisional ballot,’’ one that is set aside and subject to further legal challenge.
Logan has scheduled a hearing on the issue for Friday morning.
There was no immediate response from Fontes.
There’s a complicating factor.
The most recent figures show that more than 2 million Arizonans already cast early ballots. If they have been accepted — meaning that election officials determined the signatures on the envelopes are valid — then the ballots themselves have been separated and there is no way to determine who cast any individual one of them.
Citizen AG made a request on Oct. 4 seeking voter history and information about the number of inactive voters to reactivated the registration by casting a vote in either the 2020 or 2022 elections after providing residency proof.
The attorneys concede it is possible Fontes’ office is doing what federal law requires and maintaining accurate voter registration lists. But they said Fontes’ failure to respond to the records request makes it impossible to know.
No one from Citizen AG returned messages seeking comment. And Arizona state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who is serving as a local attorney for the Florida-based organization, said he could not comment on the litigation.
Its website says it launched “a citizen-led initiative where registered voters submit challenges to their respective county voter rolls.’’ Citizen AG also has been involved in litigation in Georgia to remove voters from the rolls before this year’s election.
The website also says that Mike Yoder, its executive director, created the nonprofit “aimed at empowering citizens and safeguarding their freedoms against unlawful government overreach.’’ It also says that Yoder has a history of filing federal lawsuits to protect Americans “from losing their jobs due to vaccine mandates that conflicted with their religious beliefs.’’
