DEWEY-HUMBOLDT, Arizona – Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes refused to answer questions from Arizonans at a candidate forum event.
The Yavapai County Farm Bureau hosted the event on Sunday at a farm in Dewey-Humboldt for Arizona Secretary of State (AZSOS) candidates Fontes and his Republican challenger, Representative Alex Kolodin (R-Scottsdale), an election attorney.
Although the candidates were told to accept questions from the audience during the forum’s final segment, Fontes did not do this and walked out, leaving Kolodin to respond to them all. The audience didn’t appear receptive to Fontes, but cheered and applauded frequently during Kolodin’s remarks.
Before all this occurred, both Kolodin and Fontes spoke to the attendees of the event.
Kolodin, who has filed numerous lawsuits over election wrongdoing, began discussing his election experience. “My very first group of clients, just a year out of law school, was a bipartisan group of folks — and this was before 2020, before election integrity became a partisan issue — that were concerned about the way that their county was administering elections, and so they hired me to sue to get the metadata from their election tabulator. And we won.”
“And then in 2020 when the Maricopa County recorder, as he was then Adrian Fontes, was sending illegal instructions to voters, we took him to the Arizona Supreme Court, and we won again,” Kolodin added. “And much more importantly than that, we got the court to say something they never said before in Arizona history, which was that all of you, every Arizona citizen and voter, has the right to challenge an unlawful act of an election official. And by the way, in my capacity as a member of the legislature, I’ve also authored, passed and got Katie Hobbs to sign, which is the good story, right, the most significant election integrity reform in Arizona history right at the time for 2024.”
Fontes said he was the first Democrat to ever speak to the bureau, and discussed his history growing up in Nogales.
The moderator asked the candidates, “What specific steps will you take to ensure that only eligible voters are registered and voting in the Arizona elections?”
Kolodin said the first thing to do is something Fontes has not been doing, which is to ensure Arizona lives up to its “legal obligations under the National Voter Registration Act and Title 16,” which is the state’s elections code.
“The secretary of state is Arizona’s chief elections officer, and is responsible for making sure our counties maintain clean and accurate voter rules. I’ve had some clients that asked Mr. Fontes for his records of compliance with these laws, and he wrote back that he didn’t have it — and the judge, the federal judge who was a Clinton appointee, by the way, was very, very unhappy with this, and ordered him to comply and produce the records. And guess what? They showed that he has not been rightly hard on the counties to keep our voter rolls clean and accurate,” Koldoin said.
He continued, “That’s why you have folks like Maricopa County Reporter Justin Heap, who are constantly finding invalid registrants. But it’s — our system is one of checks and balances, and it is the job of the secretary of state to make sure that the county reporters are doing their job. Mr. Fontes hasn’t been doing that. I will.”
Responding to this, Fontes said he was not the boss of county recorders.
“I have to operate within the rules. And when I was the Maricopa County recorder, we did operate within the rules. Now I understand that there’s some folks who want to go out there and they want to cause a ruckus and they want to sue… folks that are killing confidence in our systems with a lot of frivolous lawsuits that end up getting them sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for lying,” he explained.
The moderator next asked the candidates about Iran successfully hacking into the secretary of state’s candidate portal in June. Fontes blamed the security breach on a lack of funds.
Kolodin called him out on his response.
“You know, one of the things that I think voters are most concerned about with respect to Mr Fontes is that he does everything possible to dodge accountability,” he said. “Just actively blames the legislature, but here’s the truth. His budget has dramatically increased over the past three years. I know because I’m in the legislature and I’ve been kicking and screaming about it, that there have been very few restrictions put on, which means he could have used it for cybersecurity, but instead, wants to take this money and funnel it to progressive radical groups.”
Kolodin continued the criticism, “He’s also been instrumental in defiance of the fact that there’s a lack of legal authority for this in having an EMS gateway system written into the Elections Procedures Manual authorizing our election systems to be connected directly to the internet.”
The moderator asked, “How will you combat misinformation and help restore public trust in our elections, regardless of political affiliation?”
Fontes said Kolodin was lying about money going to radical progressive groups, and Kolodin interrupted him and said the information is on the AZSOS website. Fontes continued, “The attack that I just got neither had honesty behind it nor integrity, and that’s the misinformation and disinformation that I will continue to fight against.”
Kolodin critiqued Fontes again. “Mr. Fontes in his Elections Procedures Manual tried to make it illegal under a certain criminal law to criticize an election official,” he said. “And if you want receipts on that, look at the lawsuit that I got started. And we have a group backed by former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Andy Gould [that] litigated and beat them on it because he was trying to strip away your constitutional rights using his taxpayer-funded office.”
He added, “Oh, here’s another one on CISA. His office collaborated with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s efforts to censor speech of Arizonans on social media.”
Kolodin pushed back at the question about handling misinformation. “My job as secretary of state is to protect your right to say what you believe is true. OK, it is not my job to label your opinions, whether you disagree with me or agree with me, as misinformation.”
In Kolodin’s closing statement, he said Arizona’s elections have become “the laughing stock of the country.”
“No wonder, because dysfunction begins at the top. I have the experience necessary to do this job, not only in my courtroom work … but also in my capacity as a member of the legislature, where I reached across the aisle to …. fix many of the glaring security problems with Arizona’s elections,” the representative said.
He added, “I want to have the secretary of state’s office that gets back to its focus on helping counties administer free, fair, transparent, and trustworthy elections, and away from using the office as a way to spread partisan conspiracy theories like my own favorite one, that Donald Trump was planning to cancel the next election.”
In March, Fontes said he wouldn’t be running for Congress since he needed to protect elections from Trump, who had issued a sweeping election integrity executive order.
“With this week’s executive order from the Trump administration, I firmly believe the president is laying the groundwork to cancel elections in 2026,” he said.
Fontes said in his closing statement, “I’m not mixed up in the hyperbole of the politics that you get wrapped up in when you’re in the legislature. … I’m not going to sit here and engage in hyperbolic personal attacks.” He walked off the stage after that.
Kolodin responded alone to the audience’s questions, which were mainly about election integrity. “Before I was in office, before the 2024 election, we did not have any legally binding rules about how county reporters were supposed to verify the identity of people who voted by mail. … I fixed that.”
Regarding provisional ballots, Kolodin said election officials were telling Democratic groups which ballots needed curing. “We had radical progressive election officials and county elections offices slipping that data under the table to leftist groups. … We fixed that.”
He ended, “We fixed a lot of other transparency issues, there … [were issues] with late earlies — that’s early ballots that are walked into the polls on Election Day. We helped mitigate that by requiring a hard count of those ballots on Election Day with respect to the speed of the election results. Adrian Fontes, who creates more and more and more trouble, takes time as a change agent, using it as a vehicle to advance his policy preferences, instead of just doing his job and making sure that the system works for all Arizona voters.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on X/Twitter. Email tips to .
Photo “Alex Kolodin” by Alex Kolodin. Background Photo “Arizona Capitol” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
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