The people of Arizona deserve elections that are free, fair, transparent, and lawful. As the top election official in our state, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes should be working every day to ensure this happens. And he should be providing an Elections Procedures Manual (EPM) that gives impartial direction to county recorders to ensure uniform and correct implementation of election law.
This shouldn’t be that hard…or controversial.
But Adrian Fontes took it upon himself to produce one of the most radical EPMs in Arizona’s history. In fact, several of the “rules” in his EPM even go as far as to criminalize activity that is protected under the First Amendment—creating an unconstitutional chilling effect on protected political speech. Apparently, Adrian Fontes hasn’t read the United States Constitution or the Arizona Constitution.
Because of this illegal EPM, we sued him. And last week, a Maricopa County Superior Court ruled in our favor, finding that Fontes’ EPM contains speech restrictions that violate the Arizona Constitution, misstatements and modifications of statutes, and failures to identify distinctions between guidance and legal mandates.
So, how did Fontes respond? Did he realize the error of his ways? Will he now properly understand his role and amend the EPM to align with the law? No. Instead Adrian Fontes has responded how you would expect someone to respond when he knows he can’t win. He’s resorted to maligning our organization in the media.
The day after the court ruled in our favor, Fontes hopped on a KTAR morning show, but he didn’t defend his EPM. Instead, he immediately began attacking our organization and denigrating our 15,000 activists and donors. His smears were so over the top that KTAR immediately contacted us to give our organization an opportunity to respond to his outright lies. A few days later he doubled down on these baseless attacks during an interview with MSNBC.
That’s not how the top election official in the state of Arizona is supposed to behave. As Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes is supposed to remain unbiased. But now, he’s trying to use the power of his office to attack and intimidate organizations like ours that participate in the election process. Are we really supposed to believe that he’s not going to use the vague language he included in his EPM to impinge on people’s First Amendment rights to engage in the political process?
It’s outrageous. But it won’t stop us from fighting for the integrity of our elections.
The reality is that Adrian Fontes included language in the EPM that attempts to rewrite state law or create new laws, which he does not have the authority to do. And we sued not over statutes that are already in place, but we sued over the vague and undefined language that Fontes used in his EPM that could be used against people who are simply trying to engage in their First Amendment rights at poll locations.
The Maricopa County Superior Court judge agreed with us, highlighting 13 instances of “problematic language” in her ruling. This wouldn’t have happened if Fontes’ EPM was all fine and good. But the judge correctly realized that certain portions of Secretary Fontes’ illegal and radical manual were nothing more than a brazen attempt to destroy the integrity and transparency of state elections.
Instead of firing off baseless attacks against us and our supporters, perhaps Secretary Fontes and his team of leftwing ideologues should get to work on conforming his elections manual to state law as is their statutory duty. But if he would rather continue to hurl insults, malign our work, and appeal this decision, he should know that we will not back down. We will meet him every step of the way to continue the fight for the integrity of Arizona’s elections because that’s what the people want. And unfortunately, it’s not what they’re getting from their current Secretary of State.
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