How to register to vote or update your information in AZ

Dianna M. Náñez | The Republic | azcentral.com

Mark Henle, The Republic

SilverV, Getty Images/iStockphoto

How many Arizonans were unable to vote in the general election because they were purged from the rolls over out-of-date addresses that stemmed from violations of federal voting laws?

State elections officials told The Arizona Republic this week that they had no way of knowing because there is no process to track voters affected by the routine removals.

The Arizona Secretary of State's Office knew before Tuesday's election that the registrations of about 390,000 Arizonans since November 2016 were not automatically updated when they changed the address on their driver’s licenses — a requirement under the National Voting Registration Act of 1993, unless a voter opts out of such updates.

Some of those voters might, however, have cast provisional ballots, which can be counted if elections officials determine after the fact that they are legitimate.

As of Friday, an estimated 50,000 provisional ballots have been cast across Arizona with an additional 11,000 out-of-precinct ballots from Maricopa County voting centers. This estimate does not include Mojave and Gila counties, which haven't released data yet.

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Arizona elections officials say they have known for at least a decade that the state’s voter-registration system doesn't comply with the federal law designed to protect voters when officials purge the rolls. Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which has sued the state, say Arizona has likely never fully met the requirements of federal voting-rights laws, specifically the NVRA.

READ MORE: Maricopa County residents purged from voter rolls more than 1M times

A Republic analysis found nearly 1.1 million Maricopa County residents had been purged from the voter rolls since the 2008 election, and about half were removed after mail from the elections department was returned undelivered — typically signaling the person has moved — triggering additional notices and a waiting period before removal.

"NVRA accounts for this," said Darrell Hill, an ACLU attorney involved in the suit over state violations. "That's why they've built in safety nets to capture these voters and bring them back (into the voter-registration system)."

Critics say voters who followed the rules, did everything right after they moved, updating their address through the Motor Vehicle Division, deserve better.

The problem: Arizona doesn't follow all voter-registration safeguards required by federal law, and the violation appears to date back to the early 1990s when the NVRA was enacted under the Clinton administration.

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Behind the scenes at Maricopa County's Elections Department

Too little and decades too late

Arizona’s Secretary of State Michele Reagan — who four days before Election Day noted problems with the state’s voter-registration system — chose not to send a notice to voters before the election in case they wanted to fix their voter registration.

Reagan said notices so close to the election might confuse voters.

"The current system, the way it is now, has been in place for over 10 years and we actually agree that it does need to be changed," Reagan told The Republic on Friday. “So what is really the issue, is when do we change it?”

READ MORE: There are 360K votes left to count in Arizona

A federal judge declined to force Reagan to notify voters before Tuesday's election, but allowed the lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of voter-registration groups, including the League of Women Voters of Arizona and Arizona’s chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, to move forward.

For now, Reagan said the fix is expected to happen in 2019.

Hill said that's too little and decades too late.

Were eligible voters removed from the rolls?

Reagan said state elections officials are working on a long-term remedy — to automatically update voter registration when someone updates their license — with the Arizona Department of Transportation and Arizona’s 15 county-recorder offices.

For the general election, officials at the polls would have been able to assist voters who had not been purged from the rolls yet, said Matt Roberts, a spokesman for the Secretary of State's Office.

At voting centers in Maricopa County, he said, individuals were able to update their address on their voter registration so it matched their new address reflected on their driver's license. A ballot for their proper precinct would have been printed.

Arizona requires individuals to vote in their precinct. So a voter who changed residences and updated their voter registration since the last election should vote in the polling site for their new address.

But if a voter's registration still reflects their old address, despite having updated their license address, they should cast a ballot in the precinct corresponding to their old address. However, a federal judge, in the ACLU lawsuit, said a voter in this scenario may cast a provisional ballot at the new precinct, update their voter address on site and their vote will count.

But Roberts warned against the judge's direction. Given differences among counties and elections officials, he said their vote may not count.

"If I didn’t update my registration and it does not reflect my new address, I would go to a voting center in Maricopa County or I’d go back to my old polling site,” he said.

Though confusing, those options are arguably better than for voters who updated their license address but still were purged after becoming inactive because mailings went to their old address. They couldn't vote at all.

“Once a voter has moved, didn’t update their voter ID information and they fell off the rolls … once the person is canceled, and there isn’t a way the system can somehow magically restore them back, they have to be newly registered," Roberts said.

While the NVRA requires states to conduct a voter-registration-list maintenance program removing ineligible people from the rolls, such as for death or a change in address out of the jurisdiction, the state must follow NVRA procedures to safeguard voters. And there's no federal requirement that voters must be removed after two federal elections. Rather, that's a minimum waiting period set by the NVRA.

Safety nets include requiring voter-registration forms be made available at public-assistance, disability, driver's-license and military-recruitment offices. The forms are required when applying for services, recertification or renewal and changing addresses for services. This requirement also applies to online transactions.

The offices are required to submit registration forms to state elections officials. But in many cases, the Arizona Department of Economic Security and the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System were not providing voter-registration forms. That's being remedied under a recent settlement, said Hill, the ACLU attorney.

Arizona broke the law and government officials failed citizens who were eligible to vote, Hill said.

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Election Day in Arizona: Ballots are processed

Arizona 'has never been in compliance'

Hill believes the Secretary of State's Office and county recorders could have done more this election to uncover just how widespread of a problem Arizona faces.

“You could make some effort to contact those people (affected),” Hill said. “Probably discover just the gravity of people who in one given election weren’t able to vote. But it would take work to track that number down, and the Secretary of State’s Office hasn’t shown any inclination to put in that work to want to find those voters.”

Hill said the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit in August on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Arizona, Arizona’s chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens and multiple voter-registration organizations, found about 384,000 registered voters since November 2016 whose voter-registration addresses weren't updated after license changes.

But that number is likely significantly bigger because no one knows how many violations occurred since the U.S. Congress passed the NVRA in 1993.

Hill said it's his understanding that "the online system has never been in compliance."

Waiting on a fix

Roberts said the problem with the MVD system not automatically updating voter-registration addresses predates Reagan's election in 2014. And it's not isolated to voters who use the online system.

Voters who choose to update their driver's-license address in person on written forms at an MVD site aren't any better off.

"MVD does not have the ability to update voter-registration data," Roberts said. "However, when AVID (the new system) goes live, those changes will be transmitted to the county recorders as updates to the voter’s registration unless the voter specifically opts out."

Roberts stressed that voters who use the online system, ServiceArizona.com, to update their driver's license currently have an opportunity during the transaction to also update their voter-registration address.

That option comes at the end of the MVD change-of-address transaction, which states that an applicant "can also register to vote or update your voter registration." If a voter chooses to do so, a new window opens with a new set of steps.

But Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes told The Republic the online system is confusing, leaving many voters surprised to find their registration wasn't updated or they had been kicked off the rolls.

Will Flannigan and Thomas Hawthorne, Arizona Republic

The lawsuit

The ACLU sent a notice in November 2017 to state agencies, including the Secretary of State's Office and the Arizona Department of Transportation, of the alleged NVRA violations.

Hill said they also asked government agencies to send a letter to each of the estimated 390,000 voters who could be affected. The letter would notify voters that their address was not updated as required by federal law and include a voter-registration form so they would have an opportunity to fix the problem before the 2018 election.

The civil-rights group threatened to sue within six months if the agencies didn't send the notifications.

Reagan refused. The six-month deadline passed with the ACLU not filing a suit until August, three months before the election. The suit again requested the mailed notification and voter-registration form, as well as posting notices at polling sites. It also asked that the Secretary of State's Office count out-of-precinct ballots and automatically update all voter-registration addresses for all MVD applicants who did not opt out.

According to court records, Reagan said that sending letters before the election would be costly — estimated at $276,900 — and time-consuming.

U.S. District Court Judge James Teilborg admonished the ACLU and voting-rights organizations for waiting until so close to the election to file a lawsuit.

Teilborg wrote that there were only about 4,000 out-of-precinct ballots cast in 2016 so there may be little link between MVD transactions requiring automatic voter-registration-address updates and voters who may cast a ballot in the wrong precinct.

"It stands to reason that sending out a last-minute notice to 384,000 people to attempt to salvage a maximum 3,970 ballots from being cast OOP (out of precinct) would likely cause more harm and confusion among voters than good," the judge wrote.

The Secretary of State's Office, he wrote, did not have authority on its own to adopt rules for how the MVD processes voter registrations. That authority, under state law, falls to ADOT, while county recorders would be responsible for updating voter-registration addresses.

In hindsight, ACLU attorneys said they should have included county recorders in the suit.

Teilborg's order didn't mention scenarios in which voters were removed from the rolls. He allowed the lawsuit to move forward.

Nick Oza, The Republic | azcentral.com

Some agencies chose to fix violations

Hill said that a parallel lawsuit against state agencies alleged that certain Arizona social-services agencies weren't providing voter-registration forms to their clients as required by federal law.

Federal voting laws, recognizing that low-income and minority voters have been historically disenfranchised, have protections to ensure voter-registration opportunities.

Under the settlement, the Arizona Department of Economic Security and the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS, agreed to send letters with voter-registration forms in English and Spanish to about 300,000 people who had contact with the agencies between Aug. 1, 2017, and July 31.

The letters were mailed in time for voters to register for Tuesday's general election.

Why did violations continue for more than two decades?

Officials with the Secretary of State's Office said the current system follows state laws.

“There’s nothing in state law that requires or authorizes the secretary of state to change someone’s registration information without their permission," Roberts said, "and since it’s been discovered the MVD website has been out of compliance, the secretary of state has taken steps to implement a system that does comply. But that effort also means that we have to work with other state government agencies."

Hill said that to his knowledge no one knew until last year that Arizona was violating federal voting-rights laws.

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Arizona voter-registration organizations started questioning the system, Hill said, as they heard repeated stories from voters who had updated their driver's-license address, and later found they weren't registered with their new address on the voter rolls. Additional concerns over why Arizona registered fewer people through its MVD online system compared with other states spurred the organizations and the ACLU to dig deeper.

“I think people trust that the county recorders and the secretary of state are both going to fairly apply the law and uphold the law,” Hill said. “And when a lay person goes to fill out their MVD forms, they don’t know the exact specifics of the law, so they're not in a position to raise the issue. A lot of Arizonans just didn’t know something was wrong.”

The newly elected secretary of state, whether it's Republican Steve Gaynor or Democrat Katie Hobbs — the candidates were only separated by about 10,000 votes late Friday — will now carry out any changes. According to court records, the plan had called for compliance changes to written MVD forms by October 2019 and to the online system in early 2019, following a change in government computer vendors.

Hill said the new system isn't a real fix if there's no plan to notify the nearly 400,000 people whose voting-registration rights were violated.

“If the court accepts the secretary of state’s rationale, and the secretary of state has its way, then there’s a chance that people who were burdened in the past, or who had their registration not automatically updated, could never know that they were affected,” he said.

Fix or no fix, he said, no one can undo the harm to voters whose rights were violated over elections dating back more than two decades.

How does Section 5 of the National Voting Registration Act work?

Here's how the state should fulfill its legal obligations to voters under the NVRA:

Each state MVD driver's-license application (including any renewal application) must serve as a simultaneous voter-registration application unless the applicant fails to sign the voter-registration application. Applications for voter registration must be considered as updating any previous voter registration.

Any change of address submitted for a state driver’s license must also serve as notification of change of address for voter registration, unless the registrant states on the form that the new address is not for voter-registration purposes. All changes of address submitted to state MVD offices must be forwarded to elections authorities unless the applicant opts out on the form.

Why the NVRA was enacted: