Lawyers examining the issue have identified the failure of state officials to document citizenship status for thousands of voters as a “problem” since seven years ago, and again in 2020.

The Washington Post obtained records from lawyers who were investigating the issue for Arizona Secretary Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. They found that the failure of Arizona officials to verify the citizenship of thousands voters was identified seven years ago as “a serious problem.” It was also raised again in the 2020 presidential elections.

Arizona law requires that voters provide proof of their citizenship to register to vote for state and local elections. This can be a passport or birth certificate. The state did not have proof of citizenship for tens and thousands of long-time voters weeks before the general election. The court ruled the voters were allowed to vote, but it exposed a flaw in the state’s systems. It also fed into the false narratives that noncitizens are voting more often than they should.

Fontes’ lawyer and Fontes now claim that the problem could have been fixed years ago.

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Staff in both the Democratic and Republican administrations had difficulty understanding why noncitizens should have been classified as eligible voters in a motor vehicles database. Arizonans are able to register to vote at the same time they get a driver’s license. This is often where they present their proof of citizenship. In 2017, a secretary of state wrote to a co-worker that the issue needed to be further discussed. Employees of the then Secretary of State Katie Hobbs discovered that in a state database, a noncitizen mailed with a ballot had been incorrectly classified as a citizen.

Fontes has asked a team to review thousands of documents to find out who knew about the problem, how it was discovered, and what was done to fix it. This review is still ongoing and is only limited to records of the secretary state. A lawyer involved in the case wrote last week “there have been no documents found to date that reflect anything done to remedy, or even mitigate [the Motor Vehicle Division] issue or to formally record it for future administrations to be aware of and take any necessary corrective action or mitigation.”