Fox News quietly corrects 'wrong' story claiming that 50,000 noncitizens were on Arizona’s voting rolls
On April 13, Fox News reportedly posted a misleading article titled “Arizona to begin removing as many as 50K noncitizens from voter rolls following lawsuit.” The article claimed that Arizona’s 15 counties had begun “the process of verifying and removing noncitizens from their voter rolls, including nearly 50,000 registrants who did not provide proof of U.S. citizenship” as a result of a settlement between Maricopa County and the conservative group America First Legal over the latter’s claim that election officials were not employing all available databases to confirm voter citizenship, as required by the state.
Fox’s original reporting was incorrect, as county officials clarified to VoteBeat Arizona:
“The story is wrong,” said Sam Stone, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which led settlement negotiations on behalf of all 15 counties.
What county officials are doing as a result of the settlement, Stone said, is asking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide an additional way for county officials to check voter citizenship.
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In Arizona, around 49,000 active or inactive voters are eligible to vote only in federal elections because they did not prove their citizenship. Another 200,000 longtime residents will need to verify their citizenship status in the coming months because they were affected by a state error in tracking citizenship that was disclosed last summer.
Stone said most of these voters are likely U.S. citizens who simply haven’t submitted the necessary documents.
Fox has seemingly updated the article to “Arizona to verify up to 50K people from voter rolls who failed to prove citizenship” and removed the suggestion that Arizona had 50,000 noncitizens on its voting rolls. An editor’s note appears at the bottom of the page saying, “This story has been updated to reflect that the AZ voters on the rolls under examination did not prove their citizenship at the time of registration.”
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors