Democratic attorney Adrian Fontes has defeated Republican election denier Mark Finchem to become Arizona’s next secretary of state.
The winner is second in the line of succession for governor and has the power to upend how elections are handled, which could play an important role in the 2024 presidential contest.
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Finchem had campaigned as one of the most ardent election deniers nationally and has repeatedly said he would not have certified the 2020 election in which President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump.
Arizona’s secretary of state has the power to refuse to certify vote-counting machines and force counties to count ballots by hand, a process that could drag on for days and produce less accurate counts.
The secretary of state also has the power to rewrite guidelines on where to put voting machines and could put policies in place that restrict access. Finchem has indicated that if he wins, he would fight to ban early voting as well as put strict limits on the use of mail-in voting.
Finchem has been serving in the Arizona House of Representatives since 2015. He successfully dodged a Democratic effort to oust him from office after he was photographed outside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.
Trump endorsed Finchem last September, calling him “a patriot who has fought for our country right from his earliest movements in government.”
“Mark was willing to say what few others had the courage to say,” Trump added.
Following Trump’s 2020 election loss, Finchem brought one-time Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, also a former New York City mayor, to Arizona to air allegations that Trump’s loss in Arizona was due to widespread fraud and nefarious actions taken by people who wanted to see Trump fail. There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Arizona as Trump and his allies claimed.
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Fontes, as a Maricopa County recorder, also had a front-row seat to the chaos that surrounded the 2020 election. He has said he wanted to bring Arizonans together, not drive them apart.
“The election deniers have created an environment where they want people to doubt each other,” he told Phoenix’s NBC 12 News. “They want Americans to have lost faith in one another. What I want to do is say, ‘Hey, look! All the people that did all this work that you’re saying was fraud or fake or whatever, they’re all Americans, just like you and me and everybody else. They did their job, and every serious examination has illustrated that.'”
