Free Enterprise Club Files Lawsuit To Force Cleanup Of State’s Voter Rolls

With Arizona’s voter rolls in notoriously bad shape, the President of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Scot Mussi, is taking action. Mussi, along with the Chair of the Republican Party of Arizona, Gina Swoboda, and former gubernatorial candidate Steve Gaynor, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court demanding election officials clean house.

The plaintiffs are suing over the State’s failure to comply with Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the officials lists of eligible voters by reason of … (A) the death of the registrant; or (B) a change in the residence of the registrant” to maintain accurate voter-registration records in a uniform manner across the states.

“Election integrity is a serious issue in our nation,” said Mussi. “Ensuring that Arizonans can have faith in the integrity of our election system and representative government starts with clean voter rolls that leave no doubts about who is able to cast a ballot. That’s why we sent a prelitigation notice to Secretary Fontes last August highlighting the artificially high voter registration rates. Unfortunately, most Arizona counties continue to have voter registration rates far exceeding the national average. We hope that the court compels Secretary Fontes to comply with his obligations under the NVRA to clean up Arizona’s voter rolls.”

In their lawsuit, the Plaintiffs argue that Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has failed to perform his mandatory list maintenance duty under the NVRA. For example, the most recent voter registration and census data show that up to four Arizona counties – Apache, La Paz, Navajo, and Santa Cruz – have more registered voters than eligible citizens. The remaining counties across the state have implausibly high voter registration rates that far exceed the average national and statewide voter-registration rates in recent years. Consistent with these artificially high registration rates, the complaint alleges that Arizona has at least 500,000 registered voters on the rolls who should have otherwise been removed because they are deceased or no longer reside in Arizona.

“Elections officials at every level should be doing everything they can to restore voter confidence in the veracity and accuracy of the process, and that starts with clean and accurate voter rolls.” said State Representative Steve Montenegro.
The Plaintiffs ask the federal court to find that Secretary Fontes is in violation of Section 8 of the NVRA, and to require the Secretary to fully comply with any existing procedures Arizona has in place to ensure ineligible voters are identified and removed from the rolls.