A federal appeals court has affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit by Arizona Republican Party chair Gina Swoboda and an allied conservative group seeking to force the state to overhaul its voter-roll maintenance practices, closing out a case that began in 2024 and drew objections from voting-rights groups who said it risked mass disenfranchisement. The Ninth Circuit’s March 17, 2026 ruling upheld a lower court’s dismissal of Mussi v. Fontes, leaving Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’s current list-maintenance approach in place for the November 2026 midterms.
What the Lawsuit Claimed
The case was filed June 3, 2024, by Swoboda, Arizona Free Enterprise president Scott Mussi, and an individual voter. Plaintiffs alleged Arizona was violating Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, the federal provision requiring states to conduct reasonable, nondiscriminatory list-maintenance programs. Their core evidence was statistical: they argued at least four Arizona counties had more registered voters on the rolls than the Census Bureau’s estimate of adults aged 18 and over living there, and that the state’s remaining counties showed registration rates of 80% to 99%, well above typical national and statewide benchmarks. Plaintiffs asked the court to order Arizona to build and run a formal program to identify and remove ineligible registrants.
How the Case Moved Through Court
Secretary Fontes’s office responded on June 25, 2024, moving to dismiss the complaint and telling the court a formal list-maintenance program was still being developed. Two pro-voting organizations, the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino, sought to intervene in the case on June 12, 2024, but the court denied that motion on July 12, 2024. A federal district judge dismissed the plaintiffs’ complaint on Dec. 5, 2024. When the Feb. 4, 2025 deadline to file an amended complaint passed without any new filing from Swoboda and Mussi, the case moved toward appellate review, culminating in the Ninth Circuit’s affirmance roughly 14 months later.
Why Registration-Rate Numbers Can Be Misleading
Election administrators and voting-rights advocates have long cautioned that raw comparisons between registration counts and adult population estimates can overstate the number of excess registrations. Voter rolls include registrants who have moved, died, or become ineligible but have not yet been formally removed under the multi-step, multi-year process most states use, partly because federal law restricts states from removing voters solely for inactivity without first confirming a change of address and waiting through subsequent federal election cycles. Fontes’s office pointed to its in-development maintenance program as evidence the state was addressing roll accuracy through the lawful, incremental process Congress built into the NVRA rather than through the rapid mass purge plaintiffs wanted.
Part of a Broader National Pattern
The Arizona case is one of several recent suits in which Republican officials or allied groups have gone to court seeking more aggressive voter-roll purges, arguing current state practices leave rolls bloated with ineligible names. Courts in multiple states have been skeptical of claims resting primarily on registration-to-population ratios without more direct evidence that specific registrants are ineligible, a skepticism reflected in both the Arizona district court’s initial dismissal and the Ninth Circuit’s affirmance.
Reaction and Context
Voting-rights groups that tried unsuccessfully to intervene in the case, the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino, have argued broadly that aggressive list-maintenance demands of this kind risk sweeping up eligible voters, particularly renters, students, and others who move frequently but remain lawfully registered. Though shut out of formal party status in this case, their position prevailed in substance once the courts declined to order the kind of rapid purge plaintiffs sought.
What’s Next
With the Ninth Circuit’s affirmance, Arizona’s current voter list-maintenance practices remain in effect heading into the November 2026 midterms, and Fontes’s office is not under any court order to accelerate or expand its purge program. Swoboda and Mussi have not indicated whether they will seek further review, such as an en banc rehearing or a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court; absent such a step, the ruling stands as a setback for a legal strategy that national Republican-aligned groups have deployed in several states this cycle to press for faster, broader voter-roll cleanups ahead of the midterms. Election administrators in other Western states have said they are watching the Arizona case closely, since a different outcome could have invited similar suits demanding accelerated purges in states with comparably high registration rates relative to adult population estimates.
Photo: Boston Public Library / BY via flickr
