Adrian Fontes speaks to volunteers during the watch party for Arizona Democrats at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel on Nov. 8, 2022.
The Buzz for November 29, 2024
For the most part, Arizona's 2024 election is in the books. Top state officials gathered on Monday to sign the canvassing of election results, meaning results in all but the handful of races that require recounts are official.
And, for Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, things went well.
"I'll say it went really well. And frankly, including the outcome, my personal opinion notwithstanding, the voters voted and they got the result that they asked for. And that's really, what really matters here, right? It was easy to vote across the entire state. The process was very, very smooth. And clearly there were some hiccups here and there, but at the end of the day 2024, was about as good an election as we could hope for."
Smoothly does not mean perfectly. A handful of issues including bomb threats, mechanical problems and concerns about an old voter registration law did cause some concern. But Fontes said they did not affect the ability of citizens to cast a ballot.
"Those bomb threats, they did not disrupt the election, and that has to do with the fact that we took a lot of time to train local election officials across the state, worked on opening up lines of communication with law enforcement, both at the state, local and at the federal level, and our preparations put us in a place to be able to continue the operation without major disruptions in spite of the numerous bomb threats we had all over the state and the counties. So all of that having been said, we did about as well as you could," said Fontes.
He credits planning for possible issues and running exercises for such events as moves that helped prepare people for Election-Day incidents. And said such moves are part of a plan to keep voting going, even when conditions are not conducive.
"You've always got to have generators around in case the power goes out. You've always got to have that fire extinguisher in case there's an electrical fire or something. You've always got to have your law enforcement ready to respond in case something of that requires that response happens. This is just another sort of part of our response preparedness, right? And election administrators are perpetual preparers. We're already getting ready for '26 right now, and we just certified 2024."
The biggest calls for improvement have centered around the pace at which Arizona counties count ballots. Fontes said, should lawmakers want to quicken results, he's happy to help as long as it does not affect other important aspects.
"I'm not willing to sacrifice accuracy for speed. I'm not willing to sacrifice access. Our voters have to have access, and they've got a ton of access right now. Some of the proposals on the table would narrow that a little bit. Those are non-starters for me. We've got conversations ongoing right now with a lot of the folks, and I hope we can come to reasonable solutions if, in fact, we believe that we've got to do something about it, which I don't personally think we do, but a lot of people seem to want to. So let's see how we can work together to make it happen."
He said one way to ensure results come quicker would be to think carefully about what goes on the ballot, thus lessening the number of items that have to be counted.
"I wish the legislature would work more closely with the governor and not send so many things to the ballot. That would have cut a page off, I think, just about everywhere where It was two pages or more. Number one. And so you know that that political petulance that we see, that they're just going to bypass the governor's veto pen instead of trying to work with her, that seems silly to me, and we saw the results. Most of what they proposed failed miserably."
One major issue that Fontes hopes to see fixed quickly is the group of voters whom were discovered to have never given proof of citizenship in the years since a law requiring that passed.
"I think it's going to have a direct impact in the March elections. If we don't get this whole thing resolved before, then, there's going to be a lot of voters out there who have been used to getting a ballot in the mail for municipal elections, and they won't be for March. And that's going to not sit well with a lot of folks, because remember the Supreme Court said, for the general election in November, you're all good to go. But they left that dot, dot, dot out there. So unless we get another court order, which I doubt will happen, particularly given that these are state and local elections, I think that we're going to have to get some stuff done really quickly. And I hope all of our partners across government are paying close attention to this."
He added that he does not think it is a coincidence that these are the types of discussions being had now, as opposed to what was being heard after the 2020 and 2022 elections, which were marked with talk of voter fraud and election rigging.
"We didn't see it this year because, well, for two reasons. Number one, we had a really, really well run election across the state. And number two, the folks who would complain, they won. And which proves the point that the only complaint they had was that their candidate lost. There's no truth to election denialism. We know this. Every serious person who's looked at anything understands there's never been any evidence about this."
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