Thousands of Arizona voters received letters asking if they’d moved. Here’s why.

Filed 7h ago · Via Arizona Mirror · The Buffoon Desk

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Bad Ideas (clean)

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Pete Souza · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Nearly 150,000 Arizona voters, most in Maricopa County, received notices asking if they had moved, prompted by a 2022 law requiring the secretary of state to cross-check voter rolls against driver's license records monthly.

Many recipients told reporters they had lived at the same address for years or decades; the trigger turned out to be trivial formatting differences, like 'Unit 1' versus '# 1' or 'lane' versus 'LN', not actual relocations.

County officials say the notices do not cancel registration or affect eligibility, and voters whose addresses are correct need do nothing, though officials acknowledge the report swept up people who never moved at all.

The bill's original version was vetoed by then-Gov. Doug Ducey over fears it could be used to disqualify voters improperly; a revised version passed in 2022 and was delayed further by legal challenges before taking effect this year.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Somebody built a metal detector fine enough to go off over a hyphen, then mailed a letter to everyone it beeped at telling them to prove they still live in their own house. The officials insist nothing was done in error, which is a funny thing to insist about a system that cannot tell 'North' from 'N.' If the goal really was catching people who moved, you'd think the software would know the difference between an address and a punctuation style.

Source: Read the original at Arizona Mirror → Scored: Bad Ideas (clean) · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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