Majority of non-citizen voters purged in Arizona County came from voter drives: Report

A majority of voter registrants in a critical Arizona border county purged from the rolls over citizenship issues in recent years registered due to the efforts of "political parties and group drives," a report form the Public Interest Legal Foundation has revealed.

Arizona maintains a tiered voter registration system in which registrants who did not sufficiently prove their citizenship may only vote in federal elections. The state also reviews such individuals periodically and, should officials discover foreign nationality through government data, purges them.

Pima County, which includes Tucson, is situated along the southern border with Mexico. Since 2021, the municipality removed 186 registrants over citizenship issues, include 28 in 2023, 132, in 2022, and 16 in 2021. Of those, seven had prior histories of voting. The party breakdown featured 108 No Party, 46 Democrats, 28 Republicans, three independents, and one Libertarian.

Sixty-five percent of those illicit registrants came from "political parties and group drives," PILF asserted.

PILF identified the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (Motor Voter) as the most common means by which ineligible foreign nationals register to vote. This can also occur at DMVs in states that issue driver's licenses to immigrants, legal or otherwise, at DMVs.

"Federal law hampers states’ abilities to validate citizenship during the voter registration process. The federal government could update Motor Voter to allow states to require proof of citizenship and add citizenship to Motor Voter’s reasonable list maintenance requirements," PILF President J. Christian Adams said. "Arizona is limited to building imperfect systems to address the problem of foreign national voting."

Of the 186 purged voters, 120 came from political/group drives, while 24 came from so-called "Motor Voter" or an agency. Sixteen registrations were self-initiated while 26 were of unknown origin.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.