Adrian Fontes in 2017. || Photo by Gage Skidmore | /Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
Arizona is one of five states where an election denier is running to be the chief election official
BY KIRA LERNER || Arizona Mirror
Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for Arizona secretary of state, has said he would move away from electronic counting of votes and end early voting. Photo by Courtney Pedroza | Getty Images
Adrian Fontes is tired of responding to the outrageous claims of Mark Finchem, a Trump-backed Republican election denier with ties to QAnon. Fontes faces Finchem on the ballot this year for Arizona secretary of state.
Finchem has said that if elected the state’s chief election official, he would ban early voting, move away from electronic vote counting, and allow state legislators to be able to reject election results. But he’s offered little rationale or explanation for his extreme proposals.
“He needs to explain himself and he’s not doing it,” Fontes said. “All he does is throw out these crazy theories, these crazy ideas, and nobody is asking him why.”
Much of Fontes’ frustration stems from the fact that he is not running in a typical race for Arizona’s top election official. Finchem isn’t a traditional Republican who might propose restrictions on voting, but would come to the campaign with explanations for why he believes his policies would protect the integrity of elections.
Instead, Fontes is running against someone who has said without evidence that the 2020 election was rigged and who marched on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Election deniers are running for secretary of state in five critical states across the country, and the Democrats challenging them in November say their campaigns have taken on increased importance.
As Fontes put it, “It’s a great deal of pressure knowing you’re running in a political contest to save the republic.”
“I’m just a county election official who knows how to do this stuff and would be best suited to be Arizona’s next secretary of state,” he said.
Fontes said he’s not pleased that Finchem has drawn so much attention to their race by spewing falsehoods about the election system and proposing radical changes to voting procedures.
