Tim Steller's column: Fontes says Trump building a case to suspend 2026 election

Arizona’s top election official, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, thinks Pres. Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to suspend the 2026 election.

Fontes, a Democrat up for re-election next year, said his thinking is not partisan, even though he opposes Trump.

“It’s hard to be able to sound this clarion call without sounding political,” Fontes said. “But this is not political. This is existential.”

His likely Republican opponent in 2026 calls Fontes a “conspiracy theorist” who is distracting from his own poor record with these allegations.

Fontes’ concern rests on five main points, which he laid out in an interview Wednesday, Aug. 27. Overall, he said, what people should do is look at how Trump has handled other issues, such as tariffs, to see his willingness to seize undue power.

“If we look at the rationale that Pres. Trump used and the case that he built to declare the economic emergencies that he has and then issue tariffs, which he does not have the unilateral power to do, OK, we know that he’s willing to do that,” Fontes said. “Now, if you look at the case that he’s making about elections, it’s similar, right, but there’s a lot more moving parts, and so the case is building itself.”

The first point Fontes makes is about Trump’s rhetoric, especially his repeated comments during the 2024 election that if people vote for him, “you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

“You could chalk it up to just plain old rhetoric, but if you look at what happened in January and February, you had a complete dismantling of the agency called CISA,” Fontes said.

This is Fontes’ second point, referring to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security that has offered security help and coordination to local election officials during recent elections.

“All of that coordination resulted in Election Day 2024, with almost no disruptions, even when we had 15 bomb threats across the state of Arizona on election day,” Fontes said.

Now, the infrastructure for protecting elections is weakened, he said. If an election system in Kentucky, for example, were attacked, under the old system, every jurisdiction with that same software would receive a warning and instructions on how to protect against it. Not anymore, he said.

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The third point: The Justice Department has received orders from the White House to investigate election officials. Among those officials, the former director of CISA, Chris Krebs, but specifically state and local officials.

“Think about that: The president is directing the Department of Justice to do criminal investigation into election administrators. Now there’s the intimidation factor,” Fontes said. “It’s a threat. This is serious, and when you’re talking about people who don’t have the means to protect themselves against the full weight of a federal criminal prosecution, the threat is the bad act.”

Fourth, Fontes said, are the president’s executive orders and threatened orders. The first, issued March 25, attempted to seize control over voter-registration rolls, mandating new proof of citizenship, and dictate what equipment can be used as well as which ballots can be counted after Election Day. That executive order has been blocked by two different judges.

Trump has also announced he plans to issue an executive order banning mail-in voting, except for certain small groups of voters, and requiring voter identification to cast a ballot. And he has, of course, demanded and received new congressional districts in Texas in order to get more Republicans elected.

“He’s doing that on a political whim, based on his fear of losing in 2026,” Fontes said. “Why wouldn’t he set up the next step, which is just eliminate the elections altogether and stay in power?”

The fifth part, Fontes said, is the deployment of federal law enforcement and troops, especially to Democrat-dominated cities. They could seize voting equipment, arrest election officials and otherwise block the election.

“You’ve got a National Guard that’s operating under command of the central government,” said Fontes, who is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. “(If) you decide you’re going to suspend the elections under an emergency, you’ve already got your boots on the ground, and you can execute that very, very easily.”

“It is not unreasonable to surmise, based on this evidence, that Donald Trump is setting up a situation where people are so worried about the election administration capacity of the United States of America that he can declare an emergency and suspend the elections in 2026.”

Fontes said that he knows some Republicans are concerned about the federal government reaching unilaterally into election administration, which is generally under state and local control. But he said none has been willing to speak out.

“I don’t stand alone in my concern, but it seems like there’s not a heck of a lot of people who are willing to step up and say what needs to be said. What needs to be said is this: If we don’t act now, eventually it might be too late. If we don’t stop this foolishness now, out of principle and with character, then it might be too late.”

Republican state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who plans to run against Fontes in 2026, finds his concerns absurd.

“Adrian Fontes has devolved into little more than a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, and his latest whopper about Pres. Trump is sadly par for the course,” Kolodin said in a text message. “His fantastical assertions are designed to distract from his own repeated failures and shortcomings, projecting onto others that which he himself is guilty of — the mass suppression and disenfranchisement of Arizona voters previously as Maricopa County recorder and now as secretary of state.”