Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes thinks lawmakers want him to fail.
After the E-Qual system (which allows candidates to collect nominating petition signatures online) failed over the weekend, Fontes held an impromptu press call on Monday to blast lawmakers for continually refusing to fund his office’s mandatory technology maintenance.
He accused them of setting him up to fail so that they can call him incompetent and sow doubt in the upcoming election.
“They're setting us up for failure. That's the only way that I can see this. They want these systems to fail so they can point at us and say, look, these things aren't working,” he told reporters.
This weekend’s glitch was just one of many tech failures from the office in recent years — failures that Fontes blames lawmakers for. He says he’s been pleading for more money for years, but those pleas have fallen on plugged ears at the Legislature.
More immediately, he blames the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, a committee of legislators that controls the purse strings of some already approved appropriations. In this case, Fontes is accusing them of sitting on $2.8 million in state funding left over from last year’s special election in Congressional District 7, and not allowing him to spend it to beef up his cyber systems before the 2026 election.
Although Republican lawmakers constantly talk about the importance of secure elections, they’re not even doing the bare minimum — spending already earmarked dollars — to ensure that our systems are functional and secure, he argued.
“What they’re doing is making a lot of mouth noises and they’re not following through,” he said.
Fontes said this weekend’s E-Qual system crash happened as the office was making changes because lawmakers moved up the primary election date from August to July.
An employee entered a typo — a 2025 date, rather than 2026 — that caused a cascading series of failures. He called in staff to work over the Super Bowl weekend, and was able to get the glitch fixed, but said the error speaks to the shakiness of the tech throughout his office.
Fontes said that his office would love to overhaul its entire tech suite, including the disastrous campaign finance system. But that’s part of a larger $9.4 million request that would have to be included in the state budget.
Right now, he’s just seeking $2.8 million in “band-aid money” from JLBC to keep the various systems afloat through the November election.
His office is hoping that by drawing attention to the weekend glitch, he can pry loose some of that money to improve cybersecurity and infrastructure ahead of November.
And pressure has worked in the past, at least to some degree. After sending letters to the JLBC and lawmakers in January, the JLBC released $650,000 — enough to fund one of the 11 urgent requests he wants funded.
A history of tech troubles
This weekend’s outage was nothing new.
The office has long been marked by tech failures, dating back to at least Secretary of State Michele Reagan, who spent millions starting in 2015 to upgrade the state’s campaign finance system, only to wind up with a system plagued by glitches and errors that was arguably worse than the original.
Last summer, the office faced a cyberattack from suspected Iranian hackers, who replaced candidates’ images with the image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The image that appeared on the candidate portal instead of pictures of candidates.
In the wake of that hack, Fontes said he offered to brief lawmakers on what happened. Some took him up on that offer, while others didn’t seem too concerned about Iran hacking Arizona’s candidate portal.
“(Republican Sen. Wendy) Rogers responded to our offer for a briefing and said, quote, ‘Unless this breach singularly affects me in particular, a general explanation on email is fine,’” Fontes said. ”This is the cavalier attitude that these election deniers have about anything that has to do with actual election security.”
Fontes said the security upgrades his office made to the “old, clunky” system in the wake of that hack has made it more fragile and duct-taped together, making upgrades more urgent.
Tricky timelines and ambitious plans
But Fontes is up for reelection this year — and if he fails to win reelection, his successor may have wildly different priorities for the office.
The tech upgrades would be done through a mix of in-house staff and outsourced private companies — and those kinds of projects rarely survive a transition phase.
One bright spot on the horizon: Fontes says his office has already started working on an improved lobbyist registration and reporting portal, which will eventually turn into a public-facing searchable database.1
Upgrading the tech of the office — including the lobbyist reporting system — has also become a focus for his would-be Republican opponent, Gina Swoboda, who recently filed a statement of interest to run for the office (and started collecting signatures to run through the E-Qual system that went down over the weekend.)
Fontes’ timeline for pulling off the revamped lobbying database was hazy — he said he hopes to have that up and running somewhere between July and when his first term ends in January.
Convicted Navajo County Recorder Timothy Jordan, who said in an email to county officials that he wants to resign to avoid media distraction, won’t leave office until April 15.
Jordan, who pleaded guilty to a felony and misdemeanor related to a road rage incident in which he brandished a weapon on two 18 year olds, had agreed to resign after discussions with county officials before he submitted his letter of resignation Jan. 27, according to the email sent to the county human resources director, county manager and chairman of the board of supervisors.
“I do not wish to fight or cause a scene that would bring greater pains and prolonged agony upon Navajo Count [SIC] Government, nor the people,” Jordan wrote. “I feel my decision is within the best interest of all. I choose to leave quietly as possible to avoid further media and social distractions.”
Jordan asked the officials to work with him until April 15 “as we originally had agreed upon for an April setting give or take a few days,” according to the email.
Jordan said in the email that he and his family will be relocating, and he recommended that the county’s voter registration coordinator, Jose Lerma, serve as the interim recorder until 2028. Lerma would have to change his voter registration from independent to Republican to get the job, Jordan said. The county is taking letters of interest until March.
As we previously noted, Jordan pleaded guilty to an undesignated class 6 felony, meaning he could stay in office if the court put him on probation because the offense would be treated as a misdemeanor. He is scheduled for sentencing this Friday.
Although there is no overt mention in the email or resignation letter of county officials pressuring Jordan to resign, there is a history of county supervisors not wanting fellow office holders who are accused of crimes to serve.
In 2019, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors publicly called for then-County Assessor Paul Petersen to resign as he faced allegations of human trafficking and fraud in three states related to an adoption scheme involving women from the Marshall Islands. The board also suspended Petersen because he could not serve while sitting in jail, although it did not have the authority to fire him.
Petersen resigned in January 2020.
She’s running: Although Gina Swoboda hasn’t (officially) decided whether she’s going to ditch her run for Congress in favor of running for Arizona secretary of state, that didn’t stop her from taking a swipe at Rep. Alexander Kolodin, the only GOP candidate officially running against Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. Swoboda, who until recently was the chair of AZGOP, said Kolodin doesn’t “have the temperament to run that office in an impartial way,” in an interview with 12News’ Brahm Resnik. She blamed Turning Point USA and the Freedom Caucus for putting up candidates who are too far to the right.
"He's going to get destroyed in the General Election by Secretary Fontes,” she said. “Right now, we do not have a race, and we are conceding that office without even putting up a fight."
Are you an independent or Independent?: Republican Sen. T.J. Shope is trying to block any new party from using words like “independent” or “party not designated” in its name, Jeremy Duda reports for Axios. His bill, SB1609, comes from worries that voters who don’t want to align with any particular party might check the box for the new Independent Party. But, considering the Independent Party is already gathering signatures for gubernatorial candidate Hugh Lytle, Shope says he might tweak the bill so it won’t take effect until 2027. Separately, the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission has filed2 a lawsuit to stop the Independent Party from calling itself that for the same reason.
Sir, this is an Arby’s: The public comment portion of city and town council meetings has been fraught with tension and outbursts for a while now, and that’s led some local officials to pass rules restricting how many people can speak, and even which topics they can address at the mic. The Republic’s John Leos runs down all the flareups, ordinances and threats of litigation in the Valley’s cities and towns.
Upgrade to a paid subscription to help us cover all the other flareups, ordinances and threats of litigation that Arizona’s politics has to offer.
Superintendent smackdown: Republican Rep. Matt Gress launched a broadside against school district superintendents (and maybe one superintendent in particular?), with a package of five bills that limit superintendents’ pay and benefits, as well as blocking them from having second jobs or signing contracts with district for longer than one year, J. Graber reports for the Scottsdale Independent.
Mazel tov: Democratic Arizona attorney Roy Herrera’s wedding to Democratic campaign strategist Abigail O’Brien was such a who’s-who event that it made yesterday’s Politico Playbook, which included the following “SPOTTED:” section.
SPOTTED: Ruben and Sydney Gallego, Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Chad Campbell, Jen Cox, Luis Heredia, Raphael Chavez-Fernandez, David Montes, Grisella Martinez, Barrett and Jennifer Marson, Mayra Macías, Jorge Neri, Oscar Ramirez, Kyle Victor, Tory Gavito, Adrian Saenz, Kristian Ramos, Sean McEnerney, Mariah Gould, Jacques Petit, Joe Wolf, Marcus and Meghaen Dell’Artino, Jason Barraza, Frank McCune, Billy Kovacs and Ian O’Grady.
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More than 135 million people tuned in to Puerto Rican music superstar Bad Bunny’s record-breaking Super Bowl halftime performance — including, it seems, President Donald Trump.
Now, right-wing politicians in Arizona and across America are giving their own performance: trying desperately to convince themselves that Turning Point USA’s “All-American” (Fun fact: Also all-white) MAGA burlesque was anywhere near as widely viewed or relevant.
For instance, Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman — the leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus — tweeted that “30 MILLION+ eyeballs” watched the MAGA show and included a screenshot that showed only 5.6 million people were watching it.
So many questions, so little time.
We caught up with Hoffman on Monday morning outside the Capitol, where we saw him smile — for probably the first time ever — while raving about Kid Rock’s chaotic, screeching performance in cut-off jorts.
We assumed that 30 million eyeballs was his way of saying 15 million people. But nope — he later texted us to say his first estimate was way off and, in fact, 60 million people watched Turning Point’s show.
While Hoffman continues to work through the math, the best comparison is live viewers — it was 135 million for Bad Bunny and about 6 million for MAGA.
Evidently, that’s a “MASSIVE WIN for culture,” per Hoffman.
We applaud Turning Point for this huge win.
Quick, someone give them a shiny golden participation trophy.
1 Today’s homework: Go use the existing lobbyist reporting system to try to figure out who’s the lobbyist for or against your favorite issue. It’s damn hard to navigate. And that’s not even getting into the spending that lobbyists have to report when they wine and dine lawmakers — that information is kept in a format that takes some serious data skills to dissect, and the data hasn’t been updated online since 2022.
2 CORRECTION: A previous version of today’s edition said Clean Elections was mulling a lawsuit. They already filed it.