PHOENIX — Democrat Adrian Fontes on Friday won the top elections post in Arizona, defeating a Republican rival who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and who said he would not have certified Democrat Joe Biden’s win in the state.
The Associated Press and the New York Times projected Fontes as the winner Friday night when his lead increased to about 118,000, giving him 53% of the votes counted so far to Republican Mark Finchem's 47%.
Fontes, who formerly oversaw parts of the election system in Arizona’s most populous county, had said Finchem represented a danger to democracy if he had won. The secretary of state, working with the governor and attorney general, has broad authority to rewrite the state’s election rules and plays a role in the certification of results.
Finchem, of Oro Valley, had emerged as one of the most prominent Republicans running for secretary of state positions around the country who falsely claimed that Biden was not elected legitimately. He had argued for significant changes to Arizona’s elections after Biden won the state in 2020 and had been endorsed by Trump.
After winning the state’s primary election in August, Finchem said he wanted to restore the rule of law to elections in the state, declaring: “Right now, we have lawlessness.”
There was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 elections, including in Arizona, where reviews of the voting upheld Biden’s narrow victory.
Finchem joined with Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, in a lawsuit seeking to get rid of the machines that tabulate votes for the midterm elections and replace that process with a hand count of all ballots in the state. Election experts say full hand counts can be painfully slow, are prone to human error and are not as accurate as machine tallies.
The lawsuit alleged that the vote-counting machines used in Arizona aren’t reliable, a claim for which there is no evidence. They are appealing a decision by a federal judge to dismiss their lawsuit.
Fontes is a former Marine and local prosecutor who staked his campaign on pledges to protect voting rights. He lost his seat as Maricopa County recorder after one term to a Republican in 2020.
Arizona’s secretary of state race was one of several around the country featuring Republican candidates who pushed a variety of election conspiracy theories to promote the false claim that former President Donald Trump was cheated out of reelection. Many of those candidates ended up losing, including those in Michigan and New Mexico, although several went on to win the posts in heavily Republican states.
