WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday partially granted a request from the Republican National Committee to have Arizona uphold measures that require people to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.
In what is likely to be one of many election-related disputes to come before the courts ahead of the November election, the justices have allowed one of three provisions of the state law to stand.
The vote was 5-4 on allowing limited enforcement of the law, with conservative justices in the majority. One conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined the three liberal justices in their dissent. The court did not explain its reasoning in a brief ruling.
Three conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — said they would have allowed all three provisions.
More than 40,000 people have registered to vote in federal elections in Arizona without providing proof of citizenship, though state officials say most are inactive voters and only a small number are likely to be affected. In the 2020 election, President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in Arizona by just over 10,000 votes.
The provision that the court allowed the state to enforce required that officials would have to deny attempts to register to vote using the state’s own registration form if the person could not provide documentary proof of citizenship.
But the court upheld separate provisions challenged by the Biden administration that would have barred people without proof of citizenship from voting in presidential elections or by mail if they had registered to vote using a different, federal registration form.
“I am concerned that there should be no changes to the process so close to an election. It creates confusion for voters,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a statement.
The RNC hailed the decision as a victory for election integrity, despite the lack of evidence that non-citizens vote in U.S. elections.
“While Democrats have worked to undermine fundamental election safeguards and made it easier for non-citizens to vote, we have fought tooth and nail to preserve citizenship requirements, enforce the law, and secure our elections,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.
The Biden administration argued that the provisions upheld by the Supreme Court violate a federal law called the National Voter Registration Act. That law requires people who register to vote in federal elections to certify that they are U.S. citizens, but does not require documentary proof.
Arizona’s 2022 law, which has never been enforced, was itself a response to a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated an earlier attempt to impose a proof of citizenship requirement. The high court subsequently said that the National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from adding additional requirements to forms people must fill out to vote in federal elections.
In the wake of the ruling, Arizona retained the proof-of-citizenship requirement for state elections, but not for federal elections. This effectively created a tiered registration process, whereby certain potential voters can only register to vote in federal elections.
While the Biden administration objected to the new provisions requiring proof of citizenship to vote for the president or to vote by mail, other complainants, including voting rights groups, raised their own objections, focusing on the state’s registration form.
State officials, including Fontes, have refused to enforce the law. The law was passed by Republicans, but Fontes and other state leaders, including Attorney General Kris Mayes, are Democrats.
A federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals on August 1 declined to block the ruling.
The RNC, backed by Republican leaders in the state Legislature, said in court documents that the lower court’s ruling was “an unprecedented curtailment of the Arizona Legislature’s sovereign authority to determine voter qualifications and structure participation in its elections.”
Fontes had previously said that many of the more than 40,000 people who registered to vote in federal elections were likely students, military personnel and Native Americans who did not have birth certificates on hand when they registered to vote. Only about 5,000 of the voters had registered to vote by mail.
Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, said in her court filing that “judicial intervention at this stage would undermine the orderly conduct of the election, risking the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters who have already registered to vote.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
