Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether federal law bars Arizona from imposing tightened voting rules, including a measure that requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote on a state form.
The case sets up a high-stakes dispute over the state’s efforts to tighten its voting requirements. It is a crime for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal and state elections, but some states have sought to implement new restrictions aimed at ensuring noncitizens are not on their voter rolls amid claims of election fraud by President Trump.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in its next term, which begins in October.
The dispute before the Supreme Court involves two Arizona laws that were adopted by the state legislature in 2022. The first requires prospective voters who are registering to vote on a state form to provide proof of citizenship, and the second involves procedures for state election officials to review voter rolls and cancel the voter registrations of noncitizens.
Prospective voters can also register using a federal form, which does not require proof of citizenship. In Arizona, applicants completing the federal form that do not provide citizenship proof may be registered as voting in only federal elections, but are not eligible to vote for president or by mail. There were more than 19,000 Arizonans who had not supplied proof of citizenship and were registered as “federal-only” voters as of July 2023, according to court records.
After the measures were approved by the Arizona legislature, the Democratic National Committee, the Arizona Democratic Party and nonprofit organizations filed lawsuits seeking to block their enforcement. The plaintiffs argued that the provisions violated or were preempted by the National Voting Registration Act, as well as a 2018 consent decree between Arizona’s secretary of state and the Maricopa County recorder.
A federal district court said election officials could not reject state voter registration forms that lacked proof of citizenship, citing the consent decree, and ruled that under the NVRA, Arizona could not systematically cancel voter registrations within 90 days of a federal election.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit considered the district court’s earlier injunction and last year, it went on to uphold that order barring enforcement of Arizona’s voter-registration laws. A divided panel of judges on the 9th Circuit agreed that the proof-of-citizenship requirement for prospective voters registering for federal elections on the state form violates the NVRA, and said the requirement for county recorders to reject state-form applicants without citizenship proof violates the 2018 consent decree.
The court also held that the law bars county recorders from systematically cancelling the registrations of voters who they have “reason to believe” are not citizens within 90 days of a federal election.
The Supreme Court considered Arizona’s voter-registration laws ahead of the 2024 election, when Arizona Republicans and the Republican National Committee turned to the high court for emergency relief. The high court allowed the state to enforce the proof-of-citizenship requirement for the state form but declined to allow enforcement of its rules requiring proof of citizenship to vote for president or by mail.
Arizona has continued to enforce the citizenship rule for registering to vote on the state form while litigation has continued.
In a separate case involving Virginia’s voter-removal program, the Supreme Court in October 2024 allowed the state to move forward with its removal of roughly 1,600 alleged noncitizens from its voter rolls. Virginia had launched its program designed to clean up its statewide voter registration lists exactly 90 days before the 2024 federal elections.
Republicans in Arizona returned to the Supreme Court earlier this year when they appealed decisions in three different cases involving the state’s voting requirements. The Trump administration urged the high court to take up just one of the appeals, from the Republican National Committee, which involves the proof-of-citizenship requirement for the state form and the program to purge its voter rolls.