Arizona voters should be able to have complete trust in their elected officials to conduct themselves honorably, ethically, and lawfully in every matter concerning our sacred elections.
Too bad Secretary of State Adrian Fontes never got the memo.
In the midst of firing off baseless attacks against our organization after a court ruled in our favor against his radical Elections Procedures Manual, Fontes found a new way to violate the ethics of his office…and maybe the law.
Last week, in an unexpected, politically motivated, and potentially unlawful use of taxpayer dollars, Fontes filed a brief at the Arizona Supreme Court in an effort to ensure that votes for Prop 140 are counted in the November General Election—regardless of its eventual legality.
Think about that for a moment. By filing this brief, Adrian Fontes—the top election official in our state—unequivocally signaled his position that 40,000 duplicate signatures should be ignored and counted in favor of passing Prop 140. In short, this means that for Fontes, the ends justify the means to ensure that Arizona adopts a California-style election scheme that includes ranked-choice voting and jungle primaries. But that shouldn’t come as much of surprise…because it’s exactly what he’s been working for.
For over a year, Secretary Fontes has been actively working with the Prop 140 campaign in order to secure its passage. And he’s not even trying to hide it. Fontes is currently listed as a “team member” on the Save Democracy AZ website, which is the nonprofit behind Prop 140. Certainly, his filing and work with this group—along with Open Primaries Inc.—severely compromise his impartiality in tabulating November’s elections results given this clear conflict of interest.
On top of that, the brief Fontes filed last week wasn’t even requested by the Arizona Supreme Court. Instead, the Secretary of State took it upon himself to sway the judicial process in favor of left-wing attempts to ignore the law about which ballot measures may be considered by voters. And in a not-so-ironic twist, Fontes’ filing at the Arizona Supreme Court showed incredible hypocrisy when compared to his filing at the Arizona Superior Court on the very same day in Kirkland v. Way. In that case, Fontes argued that his office should be ordered to disregard votes cast for an allegedly ineligible candidate, who is a Republican running for the state legislature. But this is the exact opposite argument of what he produced in his brief supporting Prop 140 at the Arizona Supreme Court!
This is not the behavior Arizonans should expect from our elections chief who is expected to be fair and impartial. But Fontes doesn’t care. He’d rather take a side in a controversial measure that would be potentially on the ballot and use taxpayer dollars to make the case for a California-style amendment that would fundamentally transform the way we vote and select our candidates for public office.
For Fontes—and for his allies on the Make Elections (Un) Fair Committee—it’s clear that “preserving democracy” means counting unlawful duplicate signatures. But this is not saving democracy. It’s trampling the will of the people and the laws that govern how elections should be executed.
That’s why our organization has called for an investigation from the Arizona Legislature and the offices of Attorney General Kris Mayes and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell into Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ overt political actions. The people of Arizona deserve to know whether taxpayer resources may have been deployed in support of the “Yes on Prop 140” campaign. And in addition, Fontes must recuse himself of any involvement in ballot tabulation related to initiatives in the November General Election due to his partisan shenanigans.
In the meantime, the state’s highest court was clear that the signature challenge against Prop 140—which faced a potential deadline due to the imminent printing of ballots—may continue in order to ensure that duplicate signatures are examined and removed from the final tally. And if those duplicate signatures in question are removed, the measure would lack the minimum number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot and an injunction would be issued prohibiting any votes from being counted for this measure.
That’s the law. That’s how our elections system should work. And if Adrian Fontes truly cared about “preserving our democracy,” that’s what he would be fighting for.
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