U.S. Supreme Court will decide the future of Arizona's proof-of-citizenship voting law

The U.S. Supreme Court says it will hear arguments over whether an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote is legal.

The state requires Arizona voters to show they’re citizens when registering, but lower courts have ruled that violates federal law.

That’s led to a kind of two systems: one for voters who register using the state form and show proof of citizenship, who are allowed to vote in all races and another for those who use the federal registration form, which requires voters to attest under penalty of perjury that they’re citizens, but does not require any further proof. Those voters are only allowed to vote in federal races, not state ones.

Sasha Hupka of Votebeat joined The Show to talk about this — and the new paper that voters in one Arizona county will use this year.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Sasha, good morning.

SASHA HUPKA: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So how significant is it that the Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court, says it’s going to take up this, this Arizona law?

SASHA HUPKA: I think this is a big deal. You know, obviously, nation’s highest court, and this is a case that could have ramifications not just in Arizona, but also outside of it. Arizona was one of the first, and for a very long time, the only state to require documentary proof of citizenship from voters who were registering to vote.

And since then, we’ve seen other states also try to pick that up. So for instance, South Dakota recently had a similar law that went into effect and is now, has this bifurcated system similar to what we have. And so this case will determine whether or not Arizona’s program, essentially, system of doing this, is allowed to continue, but also potentially whether other states are allowed to continue doing it.

If you see Arizona succeed in this case, I think what you might see is a lot of other states very quickly picking this up.

MARK BRODIE: And it’s worth noting that there’s not an immense number of voters who fall into this category of only able to vote, for example, for president or Senate or Congress. But you know, it’s not, it’s not nothing either.

SASHA HUPKA: No, it’s about 50,000 voters here across the state. And to put that in context, that is still a very, very small fraction of our state’s total registered voters. But so yeah, I mean to your point, it’s not nothing.

I think one of the things I’d also bring up, though, is that we know non-citizen voting is actually very, very rare. There have been multiple studies that have confirmed this. If you go to even the Heritage Foundation, right, a conservative group, they have this wonderful, actually, resource where they track every confirmed case of non-citizen voting in the country, and it is a very small number in the grand totality of how many Americans vote every election cycle.

And so because we know that, and also because we know that people in Arizona who are on this federal-only list tend to be students who might not have their documents, or people, you know, living on tribal lands where, until very recently, birth certificates were often not issued when people were born, you know, we have a pretty good idea as to who these people are, and I think that, you know, the evidence suggests very, very strongly that almost all of those 50,000 people, if not all of them, are citizens.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So that will not affect the [2026] election. The Supreme Court’s going to hear it when their new term begins in the fall. So this, whatever happens, will not happen for 20, for 2026, rather, maybe for 2028.

But for 2026, this election, though, as you recently reported, voters in Mohave County, the ballots will be made out of different paper now?

SASHA HUPKA: Yes. So Mohave County is going to be the first in the country to use this new type of paper called Ballot-Guard. It is made by Runbeck Election Services, which is this voting materials company that is actually very large and has customers nationwide, but they’re based here in Phoenix.

And this paper emerged out of, if you remember, Cochise County had actually had this pilot program with the state to test this paper with all of these crazy security features on it. It had watermarks, it had microprint, it had these UV dead zones, it had all this stuff, right? And so in Cochise County, they actually ended up running out of time to really do most of that testing or to fulfill this grant, but they had ordered a bunch of paper for it. And that paper had all been just sitting for years.

MARK BRODIE: Like rolls and rolls of it, right?

SASHA HUPKA: Yes, like 20,000 pounds of paper, if you can imagine.

MARK BRODIE: That’s a lot of paper.

SASHA HUPKA: It’s a lot of paper. Like think like stacks of paper the size of tractor tires, stacked like up to the ceiling amount of paper. And so it’s all been sitting at Runbeck. And Mohave now wants to use it, and they’re going to be the first to use this in a live election.

MARK BRODIE: And they’ve done a couple rounds of testing. It sounds like the first round of testing was, maybe not so great. Second round of testing went better, which gave them confidence that that this paper would work in their tabulation machines.

SASHA HUPKA: Yeah, so that first round of testing went really, really badly. The paper had way higher error rates — and to be clear, when I say error rates, I don’t mean that it’s not counting correctly, I just mean that like the paper gets jammed, or you know, there’s a misfeed into the tabulator, the vote counting machine. It had way higher error rates than that of just the regular ballot paper.

But then they went back to Runbeck, and Runbeck said, "Well, hey, it might have been the static." Apparently, when you have stacks of paper, you can have static buildup, and static causes pages, or in this case, ballots, to stick together. And so Runbeck said, "We’re going to like let it sit in a room for 24 to 48 hours and just air out all that static, and then we’ll send it to you, and let’s try it again." And so the county did, and they saw that it went much, much better that time.

Here’s the thing, though: it still did not go quite as well as just regular ballot paper. Now, the county tells me that since that, they’ve also gone through pre-election testing, that the paper performed well, it performed great, they did not notice a difference. They feel they’ve sort of got this issue figured out, and they noted to me that any type of ballot paper is going to have some type of paper jam or misfeed or whatever. That’s a pretty normal thing that happens. This paper might have slightly more, based on the results of the second round of testing, but they don’t feel that it’s of an amount that it’s going to slow down counting.

But I think the thing is, this whole thing is really a big experiment, and it’s a make-or-break moment for this paper. Because if Mohave County can prove that this paper works and it works well, there could be other counties — and they are hoping that there will be other counties — that are inspired to pick it up because they think that it could really improve voter confidence.

On the flip side of that, if it doesn’t go well, well then you’ve got a mess on your hands. But I would also argue, mention that on the flip side of this, the paper isn’t really necessary. There’s plenty of security measures already in place in our elections to ensure that fake ballots aren’t like getting inserted anywhere. There’s no evidence that’s ever happened. And it costs more, so from a taxpayer standpoint, you’re paying more money.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, it’s up to, I think you were saying, up to $0.15 more per ballot on this paper than the paper they’ve been using before.

SASHA HUPKA: Right, and like in Mohave County, that’s like $20,000, right? So it’s a fairly small number. But if you look at doing this in like a much larger county like Maricopa — and to be clear, Maricopa County tells me they currently have no intention of using this paper — but if you looked at doing it in a larger county like that, I mean you are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.

MARK BRODIE: And Mohave, will they be using it in the the primary this month? Like early ballots that have gone out is are on this paper?

SASHA HUPKA: Yeah, they’re using it in the primary, and they’re using it in the general. And we’ll see how it goes. You know, the primary, obviously, is typically a lower turnout election than the general, so they’ll sort of get to sort of ramp up to the general. They’ve done all their testing, now the primary will be the first test, and the general will sort of be the second.

MARK BRODIE: Got it. All right, we’ll see what happens. Sasha Hupka with Votebeat, thank you as always for coming in.

SASHA HUPKA: Thank you.