A sign on the University of Arizona campus advertising a voting center.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
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Two Arizona laws that restrict voting by people who don’t prove their U.S. citizenship are “unlawful measures of voter suppression,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.
The appeals court on Tuesday upheld a 2023 decision from the U.S. District Court of Arizona that found many provisions of two 2022 Republican-backed laws unconstitutional. That includes one provision that prohibits voters who don’t prove citizenship from voting for president, and another that prohibits them from voting by mail.
The judges also found that the state must allow voters who don’t prove citizenship to vote in federal elections even if they use a state voter registration form. The U.S. Supreme Court in August had granted an emergency stay requiring the opposite, pending a final ruling from the 9th Circuit. That meant that election officials were outright rejecting state registration forms without proof of citizenship in the crucial period leading up to the November presidential election.
Tuesday’s ruling is a win for voting rights groups, which banded together to challenge the laws after then-Gov. Doug Ducey signed them, arguing that they discriminated against minority and student voters.
“Our democracy works best when every American can participate in it without barriers,” said Danielle Lang, the Campaign Legal Center’s senior director of voting rights, who represented some of the plaintiffs and argued before the 9th Circuit panel. “We’re glad that the 9th Circuit sees these laws for what they are: anti-voter.”
The decision is a setback for some Republican lawmakers, in the state and nationally, as they try to enact stronger laws to prevent noncitizen voting. Senate President Warren Petersen criticized the 9th Circuit decision as disregarding the August ruling from the Supreme Court, which he said was only possible “in the liberal 9th Circuit.”
“Last we checked, the Supreme Court is above the 9th Circuit,” Petersen said in a statement posted on X.
Petersen said the Republican leadership would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
The case was heard by a three-judge panel — Kim McLane Wardlaw and Ronald M. Gould, both appointed by President Bill Clinton, and Patrick J. Bumatay, appointed by President Donald Trump. Bumatay dissented, and favored upholding substantial portions of the law, including the ones requiring proof of citizenship to vote in presidential elections and by mail.
Federal law requires all voters to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, but doesn’t require voters to provide documents proving citizenship. Arizona law requires those citizenship documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, to vote in state and local elections.
The U.S. Supreme Court already ruled, in 2013, that Arizona can’t prohibit voters who don’t provide proof of citizenship from voting in federal elections. And a federal settlement requires the state to accept state voter registration forms and register the voter to vote in federal elections, even if the proof isn’t provided.
Together, those decisions created a split system in which voters who do not provide citizenship proof are registered to vote only for president and Congress, leading to Arizona’s list of about 35,000 “federal only” voters. A Votebeat analysis found that a disproportionate number of these voters live on or near Native land and college campuses.
Along with the parts on presidential and mail voting, the 9th Circuit on Tuesday also blocked parts of the law that required county recorders to conduct citizenship checks on voters who they have “reason to believe” are not citizens, and that required periodic cancellation of registrations within 90 days before a federal election.
The court also rejected parts that require voters to provide documents proving that they live in Arizona in order to vote in federal elections.
Other parts of the law stay in effect, such as those that require election officials to conduct more frequent checks on voter citizenship, and to use more databases for those searches.
Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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