by Staff Reporter | May 15, 2024 | News
By Staff Reporter |
A top staffer for Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, is backing Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican.
Fontes’ state elections director Lisa Marra praised Richer for his performance the past four years and encouraged people to vote for him.
“Maricopa County voters, including myself, are lucky to have Recorder Richer,” said Marra. “He’s responsible for so much more than just voter rolls. We need people like him in public office.”
Richer has faced widespread criticisms from within his own party over voter grievances with his view of the 2020 election’s validity and his administration of the 2022 election.
Aggrieved voters have made themselves a regular presence at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meetings. In September, voters made headlines for accusing the board and Richer of “deep state” affiliations.
Earlier this year, AZ Free News reported that he used his staff to compile news of his personal defamation lawsuit against Senate candidate and former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Part of the grievance with Richer had to do with the political action committee he established to beat GOP candidates supportive of the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. The PAC — Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona — was seen as an overt attempt to influence elections, and prompted lawmakers to introduce legislation to ban similar PAC building.
Richer’s PAC has raised over $88,500 since its inception in 2021 and spent about $83,000. In the summer of 2022, the PAC gave $45,000 to Defending Arizona Values, and $10,000 to Awareness Analytics.
Since last year, Richer’s PAC has paid him just over $8,000 for operating expenses, or just about $14,600 since the PAC’s inception.
Ahead of the 2022 election, Richer also advised the Department of Homeland Security on tactics to moderate free speech. A controversial right-wing outlet, the Gateway Pundit, successfully sued Maricopa County over its denial of press passes under Richer.
Marra apparently may relate: she faced similar revile as Richer during her stint as Cochise County Elections Director, a role she quit early last year.
Marra testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee that she had received threats during her tenure over elections administration, a claim later discovered to not have any backing according to the Cochise County Attorney’s Office.
It was Marra who resisted the county’s efforts to conduct an expanded hand count audit during the 2022 election, citing since-scrutinized legal advice from the county attorney’s office.
That same attorney, Brian McIntyre, remains under investigation by the State Bar for violating the county supervisors’ attorney-client privilege by allegedly colluding with Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.
McIntyre announced last month that he wouldn’t run for county attorney again, citing his inability to collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
For her troubles while working in Cochise County, Marra received a settlement of $130,000 due to an alleged toxic work environment.
Richer’s primary opponent, State Rep. Justin Heap, has capitalized on the public discontent with Richer to advance his campaign.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
by Daniel Stefanski | Dec 28, 2023 | News
By Daniel Stefanski |
A familiar political party is coming back to Arizona ballots in 2024.
Last week, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office announced that the Green Party “has exceeded the minimum signature requirement of 34,127 and has qualified as a new party for federal, statewide, and legislative races in the 2024 Primary and General Elections under Arizona law.”
The Party recognized its feat on “X,” writing, “The Arizona Green Party is incredibly proud to announce that we have once again achieved official political party recognition in the State of Arizona and WILL be on the ballot for the 2024 & 2026 Primary Elections.” The state’s Green Party leadership expressed gratitude to their volunteers, saying, “Thank you to the many dedicated activists, supporters, and volunteers who made this happen. Let’s turn AZ GREEN in 2024!”
Dr. Jill Stein, a candidate for the Green Party nomination, acknowledged the news from the Grand Canyon State and noted the significance of this achievement for her political faction. Stein said, “BREAKING: We’re on the ballot in Arizona! Congrats to the Arizona Green Party for this huge win – bringing Green Party ballot access to 20 states and counting! We’re well on the way to getting our urgently-needed pro-worker, anti-war, climate action campaign on the ballot across the US!”
According to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, the Green Party “did not file in time to appear on the March Presidential Preference Election ballot.”
Stein appeared on the 2016 November General Election ballot as the Green Party’s nominee in Arizona, where she obtained 34,345 votes. The Green Party was not afforded a spot on the ballot in 2020, when Joe Biden beat then-President Donald Trump by 10,457 votes in the state. If Arizona replicates the 2020 presidential election finish, Stein’s inclusion on the 2024 ballot could possibly be the difference between a Democrat or Republican carrying the state’s eleven electoral votes.
On its website, the Arizona Green Party asserts that it “supports livable wages, universal health care, free higher education, student debt forgiveness, full reproductive rights for women, human rights for all immigrants, LGBTQ+, with commitment to racial justice, non-violence, and environmental sustainability.”
Last month, Fontes announced that the Patriot Party of Arizona did not submit enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in Arizona elections throughout 2024.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
by Corinne Murdock | Oct 21, 2023 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is facing a lawsuit over the use of unstaffed drop boxes to collect mail-in ballots.
Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in the Yavapai County Superior Court.
AFEC argued that Arizona law requires drop boxes for mail-in ballots — or, early voted ballots — must be located at polling places and monitored by election workers. Based on that reading of statute, AFEC declared that the current Election Procedures Manual (EPM), enacted in 2019 by the former secretary of state and now-Gov. Katie Hobbs, and Fontes’ draft EPM unlawfully allowed unstaffed drop boxes.
“With no basis in statute, and supported by nothing more than executive fiat, the Secretary has authorized election officials throughout the state to employ unstaffed drop-boxes as another manner by which voters may cast their votes early,” said AFEC.
AFEC noted that the EPM provisions on the drop boxes contained zero citations to Arizona law, although the EPM issued over 1,000 citations across its pages elsewhere. AFEC said the omission was purposeful.
“The EPM’s omission of citations to Arizona’s statutes was surely not an oversight. When a statute supports an EPM regulation, the EPM cites it,” said AFEC. “Apparently, though, the EPM’s authors could find no enabling statute supporting unstaffed drop-boxes.”
Since the EPM doesn’t require these unstaffed drop boxes to be located at or near an election official’s building, they have been established at locations like churches, elementary schools, restaurants, humane societies, libraries, fire departments, and community centers. It also doesn’t place any restraints on the number or geographic distribution of the drop boxes per county.
According to AFEC, state law only allows two destinations and two entities for ballot submissions: the office of a designated election official, usually the county recorder, or a polling place, and a federal postal worker or voter’s designated agent. AFEC said that unstaffed drop boxes were therefore an impermissible intermediary in the chain of custody.
Unlike U.S. Postal Service (USPS) mail collection boxes, unstaffed drop boxes don’t have federal legal protections that impart prison sentences for crimes such as obstruction of mail passage, destruction of mail, and vandalism of a mailbox. Unstaffed drop boxes also don’t enjoy a specialized law enforcement division dedicated to investigating postal crimes, like the USPS.
Additionally, unstaffed drop boxes aren’t required to have locks: they may be secured with a “tamper-evident seal.”
Unlike the USPS, which requires the swearing-in of mail carriers, any individual designated by election officials as a “ballot retriever” may transport the contents of unstaffed drop boxes. Also, drop box contents aren’t scanned, counted, or entered into a record of sorts like their USPS counterparts.
AFEC also argued that USPS mailboxes offer an additional level of security through the untold diversity of their contents, whereas election drop boxes are clearly known to contain only ballots and theoretically become susceptible to bad actors.
“A USPS mailbox is further likely to contain different varieties of mail at any given time. From the outside, it is impossible to determine whether a particular mailbox contains early voted ballots,” said AFEC. “By contrast, an unstaffed drop-box contains only completed ballots. From the outside, one can know with certainty that the contents of a ballot drop-box are completed ballots, likely a significant number of them.”
Additionally, AFEC claimed that unstaffed drop boxes increased the likelihood of voter intimidation by independent actors seeking to prevent illegal ballot submissions.
AFEC President Scott Mussi said in a statement that unstaffed drop boxes jeopardize the safety and security of elections.
“Our lawsuit contends that state statute limits the use of drop boxes to locations that are monitored by election workers, which can include existing polling locations and the county elections office. Despite this limitation, election officials and the existing election procedure manual are ignoring statute and have been setting up unmanned drop boxes all throughout the state,” said Mussi. “We believe the use of drop boxes must be in accordance with state law, and we are hopeful that our lawsuit will result in election officials ending their use at illegal locations for the 2024 election.”
An expansive interpretation of state law concerning elections wouldn’t be an unusual trait of the Hobbs EPM. In September, the Yavapai County Superior Court ruled that Fontes was perpetuating an incorrect interpretation of “registration record.” AFEC also sued in that case.
Fontes had argued that the term “registration record” in voter signature verification law meant that other documents in a voter’s record besides the registration form could be used to verify signatures. The court invalidated the expansive interpretation of the term, thereby invalidating the corresponding portion of the Hobbs EPM.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Corinne Murdock | Aug 10, 2023 | News
By Corinne Murdock |
The secretary of state may face a lawsuit come November if he fails to clean up alleged dirty voter rolls in 14 counties.
In a letter submitted Tuesday, Arizona Free Enterprise Club President and Executive Director Scott Mussi — in his capacity as a voter — accused Secretary of State Adrian Fontes of not following Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
The pre-litigation letter alleged that four Arizona counties reported having more voters than voting-age adult citizens, per public voter registration records compared with Census Bureau data. These were identified as Apache County with 117.4 percent voter registration rate, La Paz County with 100.5 percent voter registration rate, Navajo County with 100.1 percent voter registration rate, and Santa Cruz County with 112.6 percent voter registration rate.
The letter also alleged that nine counties have voter registration rates exceeding 90 percent of adult citizens over 18 years old, and one county with its voter registration rate exceeding 80 percent, which outpace national voter registration rates in recent years. These counties were identified as Cochise (93.4 percent), Coconino (93.6 percent), Gila (90.6 percent), Maricopa (97.8 percent), Mohave (95.2 percent), Pima (92 percent), Pinal (91.8 percent), Yavapai (99 percent), Yuma (94.3 percent), and Graham Counties (81.1 percent).
The national voter registration rate sits at around 69.1 percent, per the Census Bureau. In Arizona, those rates were 76.4 percent in 2020 and 68.6 percent in 2018.
As of last month, there were nearly 4.2 million registered voters. Independent voters lead with 1.45 million registrants (34.5 percent), followed by Republicans with 1.44 million (34.4 percent), Democrats with 1.26 million (30 percent), Libertarians with 33,700 (0.8 percent), and No Labels members with 8,500 (0.2 percent).
“Discrepancies on this scale almost certainly cannot be attributed to above-average voter participation, but instead point to deficient list maintenance,” stated the letter.
The letter requested that Fontes modify the current list maintenance procedures to identify and remove individuals who are ineligible to vote due to a change in residence, incarceration, death, or those ineligible for other reasons.
Arizona voters weren’t alone in this endeavor. Also on Tuesday, Virginia voters filed a similar pre-litigation letter accusing the Virginia Commissioner of Elections Susan Beals of similar NVRA negligence across 101 counties. The Honest Elections Project (HEP) assisted both Arizona and Virginia voters in their pre-litigation notices. The voters gave their respective election leaders 90 days to comply with the NVRA, and 45 days to respond to the letter.
The requested response would include details of the NVRA compliance efforts, policies, and programs Fontes has taken or plans to take prior to the 2024 general election, along with complete timelines and results for any ongoing plans.
In a press release, Mussi said that it wasn’t only Fontes but the former secretary of state Katie Hobbs, now governor, which were to blame for the dirty voter rolls.
“It is apparent that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and his predecessor have failed to perform the necessary voter list maintenance required by state and federal law,” said Mussi. “Clean and accurate voter rolls are a cornerstone to safe and secure elections, and we expect that our election officials will address these issues as quickly as possible.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
by Daniel Stefanski | May 19, 2023 | News
By Daniel Stefanski |
Arizona’s recently passed budget continues to divide Democrats as they bemoan Governor Katie Hobbs’ failure to negotiate more progressive additions.
Before the new budget was approved by the Arizona Legislature and signed into law, Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes tweeted, “The present form of the budget proposal fails to fulfill the requirements we’ve conveyed to the Governor and the Legislature. This is because relying on one-time funds cannot address our urgent need for a larger number of SOS staff to boost IT security and offer technical support to the counties. As elections are critical infrastructure, the current budget proposal neglects the significance of maintaining the security and quality of our elections over time.”
After the budget was signed by Governor Hobbs, a Republican lawmaker alleged more discontentment from Fontes. Freshman Representative Austin Smith wrote, “During a House Elections Committee meeting this year @Adrian_Fontes came to testify for the ballot images bill to @electjacqparker, @realAlexKolodin, @azjustinheap, @RJ4arizonaand me. Fontes was storming through the State House yesterday cussing because he didn’t get what he wanted in the state budget for his left-wing pet projects. You CAN question ANYTHING in this country including elections. Only actual fascists and democracy frauds like Adrian Fontes hate it. Pound sand, @Adrian_Fontes.”
A few other individuals added some insight to this revelation by Smith, including Representative Jacqueline Parker, who stated: “Maybe if he stopped calling us fascists & working against us, & did his job better we would care about funding his department more… if I was in charge, A LOT more government agencies would have received much less funding. I thought he was treated too generously, considering…”
Representative Justin Heap said, “Uh oh. SofS Adrian Fontes is fuming about the Budget! He just discovered that the House Elections Committee made sure we stripped his control over millions of HAVA dollars he planned to use to “fortify” our elections. Tough break, Man. Seeya at the Joint Oversight Committee!”
Jen Wright, a former top attorney in Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s administration, tweeted, “Why would Sec. Fontes storm thru the AZ State House upset about the budget? Maybe because @realAlexKolodin & the @AZHouseGOP, & @AZSenateGOP refused to give him unfettered access to the MILLIONS in HAVA money that he had requested? #ElectionIntegrityHeroes #ThankALegislator”
Another freshman representative, Alexander Kolodin, responded to Wright’s post, saying, “Oh Gina Swaboda and I went through his budget MOST carefully. A little legislative oversight never hurt, right?”
Senator Wendy Rogers also chimed in to praise Kolodin for his contributions to the budget: “@repalexkolodin applies THE finest-toothed comb of anybody I know on planet earth… seriously. Picayune. Wonkish. But freakin’ sharp. I’m glad he’s on our side, is all I can say.”
Fontes’ issues with the budget follow the high-profile pushback from Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes, which occurred before the budget was passed and signed into law. Mayes previously sent a letter to Hobbs and members of the Legislature, writing, “The Legislature and Governor need to go back to work and produce a budget that is in the best interest of all Arizonans. We need a budget that funds essential state services that protect the well-being and safety of all Arizonans. I will continue to fight, especially for our most vulnerable residents, as well as the dedicated, hard-working public servants in the Attorney General’s Office.”
Mayes also threatened legal action if the Legislature swept “the authority of the Attorney General to direct funds received through consent judgments against several pharmaceutical companies for their roles in the opioid crisis.” Republican Representative David Livingston fired back against those statements, tweeting, “Attorney General Mayes should learn the facts first, and accurately convey those facts in committee hearings, before making demands and threats to sue the Legislature and the Governor over the budget.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
