The Republican National Committee will argue before the Supreme Court this fall that Arizona may verify citizenship before adding someone to its voter rolls. Chairman Joe Gruters announced it Sunday. The question presented is narrow, and it is not the one most coverage will describe.
It is not whether noncitizens may vote. That’s settled. Federal law makes it a crime, and nobody in this litigation argues otherwise. The question is whether a state may ask for documentary proof of a qualification that everyone agrees is required.
Arizona voters answered that in 2004. Proposition 200 passed with roughly 56 percent, requiring documentary proof of citizenship at registration. Then came Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council in 2013, where the Supreme Court held that the National Voter Registration Act preempted Arizona’s requirement for applicants using the federal registration form. The result was the strangest voter-registration system in America: Arizonans who document citizenship register as full-ballot voters, while those who use the federal form and don’t can register as “federal-only” voters and cast ballots in federal races.
Read that again. Arizona is currently permitted to verify citizenship for state races but not federal ones — the opposite of what anyone designing a system from scratch would choose. That’s not the Court’s fault; it’s a statutory holding about what Congress wrote in 1993. But it is an absurd equilibrium, and Congress has spent thirteen years declining to fix it. The SAVE Act has been sitting in the Senate.
Arizona tried a legislative fix in 2022 with H.B. 2492, and the DNC and allied groups sued. Their framing is that requiring proof of eligibility constitutes voter suppression. That argument has to explain why the burden of producing a birth certificate or passport at registration is categorically different from every other documentary requirement in American civic life, from getting a driver’s license to opening a bank account to boarding a plane. Most functioning democracies — a large majority worldwide — require some form of voter identification. This is not an exotic demand.
The timing matters. The Court already stayed an injunction against portions of Trump’s election executive order last week in Trump v. California, on standing grounds rather than the merits — the majority declined to speculate about harms that hadn’t occurred yet. Days later a district judge blocked the finalized Postal Service mail-ballot rule. The litigation is going to keep coming either way. Better to have a clear rule than another decade of this.
One distinction worth preserving, because the debate constantly blurs it: proof of citizenship at registration and voter ID at the polls are different policies with different evidence behind them. Arizona’s case is about the first. Conflating them makes the argument easier to caricature and easier to dismiss.
Keep it narrow, and the position is close to unanswerable. Can a state check whether a registrant is a citizen? Arizona says yes. We’ll find out this term.
