In January — just more than five years after the January 6 insurrection — Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes sat for an interview in ASU and recalled his experience on Election Day in 2020.
“I remember vividly — we were in my office at the (Maricopa) County Recorder’s Office in the West Court Building, planning for a physical assault on the warehouse,” Fontes said. “And I remember vividly thinking back to some of my training in the Marine Corps: ‘How are we going to stop the advance?’”
During the interview with the Atlantic’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Fontes called out the Arizona Legislature for “not prioritizing the safety and security of our elections workers” across the state’s counties — arguing it needed to allocate more funding for the cause — and railed against the Trump administration’s attempts to get him to turn over voter rolls, which Fontes says would be illegal.
The picture he painted was bleak, and — a year into President Donald Trump 2.0 — a sense of impending chaos filled the room.
But this month, we sat down with a much more upbeat, sanguine Fontes ahead of Arizona’s primary election.
The interview was sandwiched between a few notable election-related moves by the Trump administration. Just before it, Trump fired all three members of the Election Assistance Commission — a nonpartisan federal agency that provides key resources to local elections officials — and his Department of Justice sent a letter to Fontes’ office threatening any elections official in the state with criminal prosecution if they count noncitizens’ votes.
Arizona law already requires voters to be citizens.
And after our interview with Fontes, Trump launched yet another unconvincing attempt to claim widespread fraud and foreign interference has roiled American elections for years.
We asked Fontes about what he’ll be keeping his eye on in the primary contests, his concerns for the general election, and his controversial appearance in a Secretary of State’s Office public service ad.
Here’s the conversation, edited lightly for clarity and space:
There’s a lot going on in terms of election moves made by the Trump administration — the DOJ letter, firing all members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission. What are you most worried about?
Most of the work that we’re doing is really monitoring and assisting the counties when they ask us for it.
We’ve got our role that’s more limited — the closer we get to election day, the more the counties feel the pressure. And we feel it too, because of the work and the questions and all of that sort of stuff. We’re really a communication hub. But then we have to do the election night reporting, right? All of those numbers come in from us.
But as far as the primary goes for voters, a couple of really important things have happened.
We brought on board a new system to help anonymize our UOCAVA (Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act) ballots — so, military and overseas voters, under UOCAVA, get their ballot about 45 days ahead of time, and the older system that we used wasn’t the best.
Now, Maricopa County has its own system that is very good, and it’s technologically almost equal to what we now have implemented. So for this primary, we’re using that system across the counties.
What will the loss of a functioning Election Assistance Commission (EAC) mean for Arizona’s election administration this year?
The EAC was a creature of HAVA, the Help America Vote Act, after Bush v. Gore.
The EAC is really a compiler of best practices. They put out what’s called an Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) report, which is a national survey that gives us tons of data about wait times and ballot styles and barcodes and all this kind of nerdy, wonky election administrator stuff that nobody else really cares about. But we do.
So, they’re a clearinghouse for ideas. In fact, the award that they give out is called the Clearinghouse Awards, or “Clearies.”
If you’re a new election administrator or an older election administrator, you can come to them and say, “Hey, I’ve got this old system. Who are the vendors for these systems?”
And they really are sort of the odd federal agency that’s like, “We’re here from the government; we’re here to help.” And they do.
They will put out videos; they’ll put out social media toolkits. And they’ll put out a lot of other different types of information that smaller jurisdictions — again, that don’t have budgets to get a marketing team — can use in their communities.
It was behind the scenes, but we could talk about, “Hey, here’s one way to monitor wait times at the polling place. How do you guys do it?” And the EAC will present best practices, and individual jurisdictions can kind of pick and choose. So they really were a great resource.
They also establish some standards. They have the VVSG, their Voluntary Voting System Guidelines that some states have adopted, (which officials) have to follow when getting new equipment.
Now, Arizona has its own standards — which not every state has — and we have to follow the EAC standards. Some states don’t do either. Some states do one or the other. We do both.
What’s the practical impact? Well, the practical impact is that across the country, a lot of folks who have come to depend on them for research, for data, for a lot of these other things that they normally would have to pay for, now they’re gonna have to pay for it independently.
We’re close enough to the primary election that it’s not gonna have any practical effect on this primary. I have a little bit of concern about the general, but nothing that’s gonna raise the hair on the back of my neck.
The real worry is what gaps are going to exist between now and 2028, and how wide are those gaps gonna be? Because (the EAC) has been such an integral part of the election administration landscape, we don’t know who might get appointed, what they might try to do and things of this nature.
There was some criticism online about your appearance in a soccer-themed public service ad because you’re also on the ballot in November, and similar issues have arisen with public schools chief Tom Horne and Treasurer Kimberly Yee. Do you understand the concern or do you think it’s overblown?
I think that what we had is a very important bipartisan win where the Republican-led Legislature said we need to have this program, and they didn’t give us any money to share the program. And a Democratic governor went and found us the money to share the program with the public.
I mean, why have a program if people aren’t gonna know about it?
Those are the kinds of things that public officials get criticized for all the time.
Both Horne and Yee are in a primary battle right now, on the ballot right now.
The public service campaign is gonna continue, but as we move closer to the general, it’s not going to include my image or my name. It’ll be the office of the Secretary of State.
We’ve been really cognizant of the concerns, but I’m not really that worried about it right now. I mean, I happen to be on a ballot, but it’s an uncontested race, and in many uncontested races in Arizona, we literally don’t even put those candidates on the ballot. We just appoint them to the office.
What do you make of the Justice Department’s letter to your office, particularly since Arizona already verifies voters’ citizenship?
That letter was a slap in the face to our county officials.
I’m not concerned about it; they threaten me all the time. But for them to be so pointed in threatening criminal prosecution, listing statutes — and in the letter itself, sort of making a legal argument on why the county officials are going to be held liable — it’s a scare tactic. And it’s insulting, because they’re already doing that work.
That’s why I considered it insulting — I need a partner out of the DOJ. I don’t need an adversary out of the DOJ.
It doesn’t make any sense. I gotta worry about China, Iran, Russia and all of their hacking stuff. I’ve gotta worry about election deniers out there lying to people, about how things are going and how they’re not going. I gotta worry about core technology issues, because the Legislature refuses to fund some very simple technological asks that we’ve made consistently year in and year out.
There’s the typical stuff, staffing concerns and all these other sorts of things that pop up all the time. And now I gotta deal with (Assistant Attorney General) Harmeet Dhillon from the Civil Rights Division threatening criminal prosecution.
How about the Trump administration directing the Postal Service not to deliver ballots in states that refused to turn over voter-roll data?
There’s a stay that’s been issued by an order.
People are getting their ballots, and ballots are being returned. I don’t even know that the USPS is paying attention to those orders anymore.
Are you at all concerned that this could be weaponized during the general election?
The threat of it is the weaponization. The threat of it is the voter suppression.
The threat of it and all of these other things, those are the things that the desperate administration is reacting to in all of these ways because of their incredible unpopularity.
Full ballot incoming: The anti-trans constitutional amendment that lawmakers sent to your November ballot cleared a legal hurdle on Thursday when a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled that one provision banning trans girls from playing on girls sports teams, and another banning them from using the school restroom of their gender, aren’t such different questions that the measure violates the separate amendment rule of the Arizona Constitution, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Meanwhile, the legal battle continues over another referral lawmakers sent to the ballot that would severely curtail union activity. Lawmakers say it’s aimed only at public education unions, while other public sector unions argue it’ll apply to them, too. The legal fight is over whether the description that Legislative Council adopted is actually impartial and correct — it expressly states the measure will only impact school unions. (That referral has a pending single-subject challenge, too, and Republican Rep. Matt Gress, who supported it, recently told KJZZ that lawmakers should just come back into session to repeal it.)
Rounding out the courthouse news: The Arizona Supreme Court declared that the secretary of state doesn’t need to get public input on the Election Procedures Manual, which fills in procedural gaps within the law and outlines how elections have been run, the Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. It was an obscure document that nobody much cared about before President Donald Trump and his ilk started casting doubts on elections.
It was the windmills again!: Trump’s much-hyped election interference speech sounded a lot like the stuff the Cyber Ninjas dumped on Arizona circa 2021, former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer told the Republic’s Stephanie Murray. And speaking of rigged, Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator (who knew?) allegedly made more than $100,000 betting on Kalshi about what Trump would say, per ABC News.
The view from DC: Republican gubernatorial hopefuls Andy Biggs and David Schweikert are both Freedom Caucus types, but Biggs hails from a district where “a turtle running as a Republican” could win, while Schweikert hails from a rare competitive district, representation that reflects their starkly different styles, the Associated Press’ Jonathan J. Cooper and team report. Democrats really need to win Schweikert’s seat in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, but the primary election to choose their nominee “is accelerating from mess to circus,” Sejal Govindarao reports for the New York Times. And in Politico, Andrew Howard covers Daniel Keenan’s attempt to knock allegedly prolific dick-pic-sender Mark Lamb out of the frontrunner slot to replace Biggs in CD5. Lamb has Trump’s endorsement.
“A guy that goes around and says, ‘God, family freedom,’ is sending pictures of himself and nude pictures of his wife, encouraging his friends and his employees to have sexual relations with his wife,” Keenan told Politico. “That’s not ‘God, family freedom.’ That shows you’re morally broke.”
Still dirt cheap: Cochise County’s “opt-out” movement is bustling with a politically diverse group of off-gridders empowered by the county’s relatively lax building permitting process, Chandler Fritz writes in a profile for Big Think (which includes quotes from local homesteader and Agenda contributor Christian Sawyer, who chronicled the movement for us last year). And while the county updated its building codes last week, it preserved exemptions to allow people to continue straw-bale and dirt-bag home construction, per the Herald/Review.
Casa Grande resident and self-described “nerd” Jacob Petrosky wants you to know that he takes no pleasure whatsoever from getting involved in local politics.
But the burgeoning surveillance state left him no choice — per Pinal Central’s Noah Cullen.
The battle he’s waging against the city’s 10-year, $10 million contract with controversial surveillance company Flock Safety comes in the form of a petition that would require independent audits and stronger legal guardrails for the contract.
So far, it’s garnered more than 700 signatures.
“I understand how it works, I understand how easy it is to store large amounts of information,” Petrosky said. “And when I read the contract with the city and Flock, I was immediately alarmed, like ‘uh oh, this is not good.’”
But what’s so real about Petrosky’s effort is his annoyance about having to do pro bono work protecting the citizenry from the “1984” nightmare in full bloom.
In fact, he is “very unhappy” about having to speak at city council meetings, register to vote for the first time in his life this year and devote his attention to anything but his personal tech projects.
Yep. We get it, Jacob — and to paraphrase Forrest Gump, that’s all we have to say about that.