PHOENIX — Arizona’s secretary of state office must release a list of tens of thousands of voters who were mistakenly classified as having access to the full ballot because of a coding glitch, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled Thursday.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ office initially denied a public records requests for the list that was filed by America First Legal, a group run by Stephen Miller, a onetime adviser to former President Donald Trump. Fontes’ office cited concerns over the accuracy of the list and the safety of the voters included.

Judge Scott Blaney said the court received no credible evidence showing the information would be misused or encourage violence or harassment against the voters whose citizenship hasn’t been verified. Blaney set a deadline of noon Monday for Fontes’ office to release a list of 98,000 voters and information Fontes relied on when announcing in early October that even more voters had been impacted — for a total of 218,000.

Arizona is among the most closely watched states given its presidential battleground status, and both campaigns have ramped up their presence in recent weeks to court undecided voters. The coding glitch doesn’t impact federal races. But it led to a decision from the state Supreme Court in September that the misclassified voters — representing about 5% of all undecided voters — still could vote the full ballot even though officials haven’t confirmed whether they are U.S. citizens.

That number of voters could tip the scales in tight local and state races, as well as fiercely competitive ballot measures on abortion and immigration. The voters are nearly evenly registered as Democrats, Republicans or with neither of those parties.

Fontes has said he has the list of 98,000 voters but not a more expansive one despite declaring many more were affected. His office said Thursday that it’s reviewing Blaney’s decision and weighing its options.

Blaney restricted Strong Communities Foundation and its legal counsel, America First Legal, from distributing information they receive from Fontes’ office ahead of Election Day on Tuesday to anyone but county recorders, the Arizona Senate president and speaker of the Arizona House and members of the elections committee.

America First Legal’s counsel, James Rogers, said in a statement Thursday that the group is hopeful the records could be used to verify the citizenship of voters on the list.

“It is unfortunate that Secretary Fontes so aggressively opposed our common-sense efforts to help restore trust in our state’s election system,” Rogers said.

The ruling also requires Fontes’ office to release communications and data transmissions with a number of government agencies, including the Arizona Department of Transportation and Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office.

The misclassification of voters from federal-only to full-ballot voters was blamed on a glitch in state databases involving drivers’ licenses and the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division.

Arizona is unique among states in that it requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Those who haven’t but have sworn to it under the penalty of law are allowed to participate only in federal elections.

The state considers drivers’ licenses issued after October 1996 to be valid proof of citizenship. However, the system coding error marked 218,000 voters who obtained licenses before 1996, mistakenly, as full-ballot voters, state officials said.

Traditionally conservative members of the Church of Latter-day Saints in Arizona are being turned off from former President Donald Trump, in part because of his language around immigrants.

With around 400,000 Mormons in the battleground state — roughly 6 percent of its population — both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have sought to win them over in the hope of securing Arizona’s 11 Electoral College votes, but the key issue of immigration has become divisive.

Tyler Montague, a political consultant with the Public Integrity Alliance and a LDS member, told Newsweek that while many members of the church will vote for Trump, a growing number will either leave their presidential vote blank or swing all the way to Harris.

He pointed to LDS’ immigrant-friendly attitude, highlighted by the missionary programs many young Mormons take part in.

“A lot of them are in Latin America, a lot in Africa, Asia, so you have people exposed to these other cultures and other languages and they develop understanding and empathy,” Montague said. “So, you have a group that’s sympathetic toward immigrants, legal or otherwise.”

A growing discomfort around Trump’s immigration rhetoric

The Arizonan said that Trump’s rhetoric on immigration – promising mass deportations and characterizing migrants as criminals or those stealing jobs – did not sit well with those who had connections to countries where immigrants were from, or who worked and lived alongside them in their communities.

The Harris campaign has sought to tread a line between tightening border security, while also avoiding demonizing migrants writ large.

The LDS community in Arizona has voiced its opposition to anti-immigrant legislation in the past, including legislation in 2010 known as the “show me your papers” bill, which the church rejected parts around enforcement.

Some Evangelical Christians have also expressed discomfort around the lack of empathy for refugees and immigrants within the GOP, as Newsweek reported earlier in October, though the voting bloc is still expected to go for Trump by wide margins.

Are Mormons switching to Harris?

Montague told Newsweek that discomfort is going to matter among a group that sees voting as its civic duty, which could swing results in a state which was decided on around 10,000 votes in 2020.

“It’s not just the immigration issue. The culture of the church, the culture of Christ-like service-style leadership is just in contrast with the braggadocio style of Donald Trump,” Montague said. “That’s off-putting.

“The thing that keeps people in his camp, there are plenty of people that don’t like him, but they’re turned off by the abortion issue, which Kamala Harris is touting.”

Mormon support across the U.S. for Republican candidates has dropped in recent decades, according to the Pew Research Center in 2016, with George W. Bush receiving 80 percent support in 2004, compared to 61 percent for Trump in 2016.

That does not mean those votes are automatically going to the Democratic Party, though, with some feeling issues like abortion leave them with no viable presidential candidate.

Montague pointed to high-profile LDS members who could sway members of the church, including Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah who ran against Barack Obama in 2012, and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. Both Romney and Bowers have openly voiced their opposition to Trump.

An appeals court says we must pay more in state sales taxes than we earned in 20 years selling auto parts to Arizonans, even without a local store.

I am president of RockAuto, a Wisconsin-based online auto parts store that my family and I started in 1999. 

We ship parts to DIY and professional mechanics worldwide.

Since 2019, when a new law taxing out-of-state businesses took effect, RockAuto has paid Arizona sales taxes, even though we have never had an Arizona store. 

Unsatisfied, the Arizona Department of Revenue recently convinced an appeals court that we were physically present in Arizona before 2019 without knowing it and owed millions of dollars in taxes under the old law. 

Arizona wants more money than we earned

Somehow, according to the ruling, every Arizona factory and wholesaler selling parts to us became our branch office when we asked them to ship directly to our customers. 

Address labels became stores, refrigerator magnets became salespeople and, magically, RockAuto was in Arizona.

No previous court case has found a retailer “physically present” without employees or assets or someone making in-state contact with customers. 

The revenue department’s own publications even say that “drop-shipping” from Arizona suppliers — asking manufacturers or wholesalers to ship their products directly to a retailer’s customers instead of to the retailer’s store — does not create tax liability. 

Still, the department persists in demanding six years of taxes (which we didn’t collect from customers) plus interest and penalties — far more money than we earned in 20 years selling auto parts to Arizonans.

We’ve petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court to review the case. The Arizona Tech Council and state Rep. Michael Carbone have written letters pointing out that tax laws come from the Legislature, not the revenue department’s imagination. 

RockAuto may have to stop selling in Arizona

Because Gov. Katie Hobbs did not create this situation (it began before she took office), thousands of our Arizona customers have appealed to her to restrain the department.

Empowered by the appeals court, however, the revenue department has not responded.

To protect the livelihoods of our families from future attack, we’ve stopped buying from Arizona suppliers. We may be forced to stop selling to customers in Arizona. 

Dismantling relationships that took decades to build is heartrending. But we can’t work for free or live in fear of the next random, retroactive ruling. 

Other online retailers that bought from Arizona suppliers in past decades or today could be next on the department’s hit list. 

Do you or your business depend on any of them?

Jim Taylor is president of RockAuto, an online parts store based in Madison, Wisc. Reach him at service@rockauto.com.