SCOTTSDALE, Arizona – State Representative Alex Kolodin (R-Scottsdale), an election attorney, is running for Arizona Secretary of State against Democratic incumbent Adrian Fontes.
He held a campaign fundraising event in north Scottsdale last week to explain his plan to bring back election integrity to the office.
Kolodin said, “That guy has been a nemesis of mine for half a day, in court more times than I can count, and he is the most smarmy, arrogant, lawless person I have ever encountered in my time in office or in court. I can’t tell you how many judicial opinions are out there saying that you flat out lied to the courts, over and over and over. ”
He added, “Judges are like, this guy’s just not correct. He’s just a bald-faced liar, and that’s exactly what he is; a charming, smarmy, little bald-faced liar.”
Kolodin warned that Fontes will have a lot of money, since the Democratic money group Arabella Advisors funnels money on behalf of Democrats.
“The head of the Democrats’ state is funded by foreign billionaires,” he said.
Kolodin explained due to the Arizona Legislature’s budget that just passed, “Fontes will also have millions of dollars in taxpayer money to register Democrat voters and illegals.”
He added later, “There are very few safeguards on that money to prevent him from doing what he’s announced he plans to do, which is to funnel money from his office to Democrat NGOs.” Although the legislature is considered the most conservative one in the state’s history, Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs would not sign the budget legislation without steep compromises.
Kolodin said to counteract it, Turning Point USA is going to use its own money — “they have about $40 million in the bank” — to register voters.
“Of course, they’re not going to go out and register voters funded as NGOs, but hey, we don’t need it perfectly fair fight to win, like I said in 2024, we just need it to be close enough to a level playing field that if we win by a lot, we can win by a little,” the state representative said.
Although Fontes will have a considerable amount of money, Kolodin pointed out that President Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the presidential race despite being outspent, as did Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap with his opponents. Kolodin said Heap was outspent eight-to-one, and “in his general election, by the nameless Democrat who suddenly figured out how to raise a million dollars.”
Heap, who ran on an election integrity platform, ousting Biden-supporting former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, has endorsed Kolodin. No other Republicans have filed to run for secretary of state.
Kolodin explained that the secretary of state’s job is to enforce laws like the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
“So if a county is not maintaining clean and accurate voter rolls, the secretary acts as the sheriff who’s supposed to ride into town and make sure that happens,” he said.
He relayed a case he had against Fontes. He represented the group Citizen AG, which had requested public records from Fontes showing that the voter rolls were being cleaned.
Fontes claimed he had no records, so Kolodin told him if he had no verification that 1.1 million voters were legitimate, then they must be purged. When Fontes still refused to comply, Kolodin took him to court. He said when the Democrat-appointed judge heard that Fontes said he had no responsive documents, “he just started tearing apart Adrian Fontes on record. [The] transcript was so good, I actually ordered it and bought it. It was beautiful.”
He added, “I’ve never seen a lawyer in Kris Mayes’ office so scared in my life, she’s just shaking…”
Kolodin also said, “And come to find out, when you go well, then you have 1.1 million registrants. She suddenly magically remembered that he did have records and produced them. And suffice it to say, when we got those records back, he really isn’t doing his job right.”
Kolodin took questions from the audience, responding to one attendee about Fontes’ attempt to override election law by changing the state’s Election Procedures Manual.
“Adrian Fontes decided that he was just going to try to snow everybody, develop this manual in the dead of night, drop it on everybody right at the deadline, not bring the public into the process, not give people time to provide adequate public comment or any of that, because he was, he was doing cagey stuff. … He was going to use this manual to try to have conservatives arrested at the polls when we showed up to vote for President Donald Trump,” he said.
Various Republican groups sued Fontes over the illegal changes and won. Kolodin said Fontes takes actions like that because “he disdains the public. He thinks that you’re all peasants and idiots, and that you have nothing constructive to add to our elections and need to be re-educated.”
“My view is that elections belong to the people, and they need to be brought into the process,” Kolodin said. “So the first thing that I want to do, right when I’m sitting down to figure out, okay, how am I going to write my elections Procedures Manual, which I intend to be a complete reputation of every single thing that Adrian Fontes ever did is first thing I want to do is bring the people into the process. Sit down with a bunch of people from the grassroots and say, ‘How are we going to write this manual?’”
Kolodin stated, “The underlying problem is dirty voter rolls.” He reminded the group that Fontes had attempted to illegally mail 300,000 ballots to Democrats in the presidential primary election, but was stopped by the court.
He explained how cleaning the voter rolls would stop illegal activity.
“And you could print ballots for those invalid registrants, harder to do with only people that you should have on the rolls. Same thing with the machines, right? You could manipulate information on machines, right, to vote ballots or whatever, but if you have ballot registrants voting theirs, there’s a lot less people who have a blank next to their name in terms of whether they voted,” the state representative said.
Since Fontes hasn’t been transparent about running the office, Kolodin said he would change that.
“I’ve talked to my team, we see no reason why we can’t do a monthly upload to Twitter of all nonprivileged records of the office,” Kolodin explained.
He said he would also ask Andy Biggs — if he becomes the governor next — to use the governor’s plane to fly around the state to address election problems, instead of using it for jaunts to Las Vegas.
Kolodin addressed some previous problems that he would fix.
“It’s not just Election Day troubleshooting, you really got to start you also, you also have to properly vet their systems before Election Day, and you have to have a team that knows how to do that, like the logic and accuracy process, which is such B.S., like that should involve testing the actual equipment and actual ballot thickness,” he stated. “Actual printing loads that you will actually experience on Election Day, not like we tested one printer with a scanner.”
An attendee inquired about removing individuals from the voter rolls who don’t reside at the address listed on their voter registration, stating that he and others he knows have people registered to vote at addresses where they don’t live. He said that when he has tried to get election officials to remove them, they won’t.
Kolodin responded, “Under the NVRA and Title 16, it certainly seems like the recorder ought to be able to receive a report that like, ‘Hey, these people are registered at my house, and they don’t live here,’ and they ought to be able to take that report and go grab and remove after I move the 90-day notice to your house, right, then remove the rolls. I think that is within their lawful power.”
Unlike Fontes, Kolodin said he would not “push the boundaries” of the law, “bossing the counties around.” Instead, the state representative said he thinks the law “clearly extends to telling the counties how they have to do chain of custody under certain circumstances, which needs to be done.”
One of the attendees asked if it was true that Fontes had represented drug cartels as an attorney. Kolodin responded, “I know why he was fired. … I’m gonna say this vaguely. There’s some really great stuff, and that’s all I’m gonna say.”
Kolodin told the audience that, unfortunately, there is no one fix for election wrongdoing, since the Democrats will continue to come up with ways to cheat.
Afterwards, Kolodin spoke to The Arizona Sun Times about some of his legislative experiences. He said that some legislators are wrongly criticized for not scoring high in conservative ratings. He said there are legislators in swing districts, or even Democrat-leaning districts, who vote with the Democrats on bills where they are not the deciding vote, so their vote doesn’t do any damage. This makes them appear more moderate in their district, allowing them to get reelected.
Kolodin was disciplined by the State Bar of Arizona for bringing election lawsuits regarding the 2020 election. Two of the lawsuits named Fontes as a defendant.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to .
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