Arizona opinion: Minor paperwork errors shouldn’t cost anyone the right to vote

Everyone makes mistakes, but Arizona has passed a law that disenfranchises voters for the simple mistake of forgetting to include their birthplace on voter registration forms. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is now considering whether that’s legal.

We’ve all messed up when filling out routine paperwork: putting yesterday’s date instead of today’s, accidentally transposing the numbers in a long ID number, or completely missing a form’s box of requested information. When it comes to voting, the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Materiality Provision prohibits states from using these kinds of insignificant errors in voting-related paperwork to deny anyone the right to vote. Despite this foundational protection, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas are currently trying to disenfranchise voters just because they make mistakes on forms, applications, or absentee ballot carrier envelopes, even if those mistakes are irrelevant to the voter’s qualifications to vote.

Amidst an already eventful election year, these state laws drive large-scale denials of the right to vote. This threat to democracy deserves our attention.

The Materiality Provision is a critical protection for voting rights, as its history makes clear. Before the Civil Rights Act, state and local officials employed various crafty methods to disenfranchise Black voters, and one of their preferred tactics was to reject Black voters’ registration forms based on insignificant errors, such as failing to recite their age in years, months, and days, underlining instead of circling a word on the form, and misspelling the name of a month.

Congress sought to end these tactics once and for all with the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act’s Materiality Provision prohibits states from denying the right to vote because of errors in voting-related paperwork that have no bearing on a voter’s qualifications to vote.