Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes has lowered an estimate of American citizens in the county whose voter registrations were blocked because they didn’t fill out the form correctly,basing his new estimate on further research into roughly 100,000 registration forms that initially were rejected by the office. Fontes’ effort to register citizens who were initially blocked was endorsed Wednesday by a former Arizona attorney general. After digging more deeply into the matter this week, Fontes said a non-scientific sample suggests the number of citizens who weren’t able to register could be closer to 17,000 rather than the roughly 58,000 originally thought.
The newly elected Democrat has raised an alarm that eligible voters may have been denied the right to vote because their forms were missing proof of citizenship such as a passport, birth certificate, naturalization number, tribal ID or driver’s license issued after 1996.
Fontes hired nine temporary staff members to perform extra research in the motor-vehicle system to verify citizenship and add eligible applicants to the voter rolls. Fontes appears to be the only county recorder doing so, and his actions have drawn criticism from some experts.
Full Article: Former Arizona attorney general: County Recorder Fontes’ voter-registration fix is ‘reasonable’.