The nation’s highest court is being roped into an Arizona-based dispute regarding citizenship proof to be required to vote in the Grand Canyon State.
Last week, Republican state leaders and the party’s national committee (RNC) submitted a request to the Supreme Court asking justices to permit the state’s law mandating citizenship proof to be enacted before the general election this November.
The bill, if allowed to be enforced, would mandate that government databases cross check proof of citizenship and require that would-be voters submit proof that they are citizens before casting a vote. But the law has been impeded by a lawsuit filed by voting rights groups and the Biden administration.
The bill has been frozen since September 2023, when a federal court determined that the state law did not override the National Voting Registration Act. In response, the RNC has submitted an emergency stay on the pause in the federal appeals court that initially favored the enforcement of the law. But the court permitted the injunction to stay in place.
At the time, Warren Peterson of the GOP state Senate, who joined the RNC petition, said the injunction decision is “unheard of.” He further described it as “disturbing” that the idea of permitting “non-citizens to vote” would be supported by the courts. He added that the court is acting against its “own rules” and said that non-citizens engaging in elections is “a manifest injustice.”
In the Thursday August 8 filing from the RNC and its fellow petitioners wrote that the injunction is nothing more than “an unprecedented abrogation” of state law and authority which has a right to “determine the qualifications” of who is allowed to vote in elections.
The brief added that there is “interest” from the RNC because the rights of its members to cast votes should not be “undermined” by what the plaintiffs called “eleventh-hour changes” to rules and regulations surrounding voting and elections. Continuing its argument, the filing demanded “prompt relief” for the petitioners.
It also cited the urgency to have the issue resolved, considering the fact that printing ballots must occur “well in advance” of November’s Election Day. The “advised” deadline, put out by the Secretary of State, to have the lawsuit settled is August 22.
The filing was sent to Justice Elena Kagan, who oversees emergency appeals that come through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. She now has the choice of either deciding the matter on her own or asking for the opinions of the other justices.
Arizona’s citizenship-proof litigation is only one of the controversies in the Grand Canyon State. It is also the same jurisdiction that continues prosecuting a slew of Trump supporters and Republicans who falsely claimed that the former president had more votes in the state, when in reality Biden won that state by roughly 10,000 votes.
About 25,000 people would be impacted by the law if it is enacted, meaning they would not be allowed to vote if they failed to prove they are American citizens at the time of registration. Re-registration is permitted, should they later obtain the proper documentation.
