I just had a vitrectomy. Read that carefully again and be assured that, yes, I can still father children (although, if I try to, get me to a behavioral health center immediately). A vitrectomy is a procedure in which the vitreous goo is drained from the eye – a not-fun procedure I agreed to so they could reattach the retina in my right eye.
Following the surgery, my vision was temporarily somewhere in the 20/20,000,000 range. And yet, even then, I could see what’s coming: a challenge of Arizona’s November 5 election results by every losing candidate.
This tale of woe starts in October 1996, when Arizona started requiring proof of citizenship or legal residency to obtain a driver’s license. If you got a license before then, you were allowed to keep the license without showing proof. “Grandfathered in,” they call it.
In 2004, the Arizona Legislature passed another law – this one raising voting standards to the highest levels in the country. Arizona demands documented proof of citizenship to vote. (The other 49 states only require a signature on a voter registration form.) For most of us, an Arizona driver’s license issued after October 1, 1996, will do the trick.
Then, a few weeks before this issue went to press, someone in Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s office discovered an Arizona Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) coding error: About 97,000 Arizonans who got their original driver’s licenses before October 1996 and applied for a duplicate license were logged as having renewed their license by MVD – meaning they were able to register to vote without providing documented proof of citizenship.
Upon learning of this, Richer, a Republican, told me that he exclaimed, “Gosh darn it!” – because that’s the way people from Sandy, Utah, curse, and because he knew what a huge headache this presented for Arizona election officials. They’re constantly fighting off wild-eyed election conspiracy theories – including claims that Republicans like Richer are stealing elections from Republicans and a Rudy Giuliani assertion that hundreds of thousands of undocumented people voted in Arizona in 2020.
So, I’m guessing Richer spewed a “Golly!” when he was told a few days later that another 120,000 or so registered voters were found to be living in this same weird registration limbo. That brought the total to nearly 218,000 — almost one in 20 people who are registered to vote in Arizona.
Luckily for these folks, they were covered by an Arizona Supreme Court decision allowing the original 97,000 to vote in 2024 – followed by a purging of this giant voter list.
That ruling was the result of what Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called a “friendly lawsuit” in which he argued that these people should be allowed to vote, and Richer argued that they should not – done only to seek clarification from Arizona’s highest court and preempt charges of fraud.
Will their efforts – or the ironic fact that the largest percentage of would-be disenfranchised voters they helped are Republican – dissuade the election-deniers come November?
Even with my ever-improving post-surgical vision, I just don’t see it.
