Update to David Gordon’s post, Mark Finchem Demonstrates During His Debate With Adrian Fontes Just How Crazy He Is.
Laurie Roberts of The Republic adds, It took only 30 minutes for Adrian Fontes to own Mark Finchem in their debate:
Thursday night’s face-off between the two men who want to run Arizona’s elections showed exactly why debates are important. [Real debates, not this PBS 1/2 hour stuff.]
The contrast could not have been clearer.
One man was calm, measured, steady. The other sounded, at times, unhinged as he spouted conspiracy theories about many ways in which the 2020 election was “irredeemably compromised”.
Consider the central question in the secretary of state candidates’ debate: Would you have certified the 2020 election?
Finchem howled about a stolen election
Here’s Rep. Mark Finchem, who has been howling about a stolen election since November 2020:
“There are too many hypotheticals to really answer that question because we didn’t know what we knew after the election until after the certification of the canvass occurred,” Finchem told the debate moderators. “But knowing what we know today, there are certain counties that should have been set aside as irredeemably compromised. Maricopa County was one of them. Yuma county was one of them.”
Finchem offered several conspiracy theories, unsupported by any evidence, for his belief that Maricopa County’s vote was rigged. In Yuma County, he pointed to an actual fact – several people who have pleaded guilty to ballot harvesting.
“We’ve got people who were indicted for the very thing that we’re talking about right now, who pled guilty and frankly, those votes altered the outcome of Yuma county,” he said. “So how do they get counted? How did people who were disenfranchised to nullification, how do we help them?”
2 cases did not alter the election outcome
In fact, two Yuma County residents pleaded guilty to “harvesting” a total of four ballots. And it happened not in the November 2020 election (which Trump won in Yuma by more than 4,000 votes) but in the August 2020 primary.
Of course, those votes didn’t, as Finchem insists, alter the outcome of the presidential election.
His continued cries of conspiracy, however, have unfairly altered voters’ confidence in our electoral system, and former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes called him on it.
“What we have to look at here is the common value that we share, and that is, you have to have faith in our democracy. And our democracy really rests on the decisions that thousands of people make, Republicans and Democrats alike, who did the work of elections.
“When we have conspiracy theories and lies, like the ones Mr. Finchem has just shared, based in no real evidence, what we end up doing is eroding the faith that we have in each other as citizens.
“I was talking to someone last night and who said, and she’s a Democrat, who said, ‘I just want to be friends with my Republican neighbors again’. That kind of divisiveness, not based on fact, not based in any evidence that we’ve seen, trumpeted by Mr. Finchem, is dangerous for America, and we have to call it what it is.”
Fontes never tried to rig the election
Finchem pressed on with his insistence that the election was both botched and rigged.
“If the election is mismanaged, what redress do the people have for that mismanagement and that malfeasance?” he asked.
Fontes explained it to him: “So the answer to that question is the rule of law and the Constitution. There are processes and procedures. There are court filings that can be made and do often get made in Arizona when there are questions about the outcomes of races.”
During the debate, Finchem read several times from a March 2020 column I wrote in which I rapped Fontes for making up election law. The pandemic was just hitting Arizona, and Fontes decided to send an early ballot to every registered Democrat rather than opening polling places for the party’s presidential preference election.
Various state officials, including Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, argued there was nothing in state law that gave Fontes the power to send ballots to every registered Democrat. He argued that there was nothing in law that prevented him from doing it.
Ultimately, a judge blocked him.
Curiously, though, Finchem never quoted the part of the column in which I said this: “Clearly, Fontes isn’t trying to rig the election.”
He was trying to protect public health.
The ‘right’ people won, so the election is OK?
Nor did Finchem quote from any of my more recent work. For example, my column this week, in which I noted Finchem’s startling admission to a Time magazine reporter – the one where he said he knows the 2020 election was rigged because “I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden.”
Finchem did, however, offer an eye-opening response when debate moderators asked whether the August 2022 primary – the one in which the Trump slate prevailed in every Republican race – was fair.
“I have no idea,” FInchem replied. “It is what it is.”
Moderator: What changed?
Finchem: “What changed? The candidates. I have no idea. We’ve not really dug into what happened with the processing of ballots and I think that there has been certainly a heightened sense of scrutiny.”
In other words, because the “right” people won, this election was legitimate?
Fontes has the best, last word
I’ll give Fontes the final word here because clearly, he owned Finchem in this debate.
“I think what we just heard is the most telling piece of information here,” he told the moderators. “When you asked, ‘What changed,’ he said, ‘The candidates’. Not the process. Not the people running things. Not the rules, generally speaking, but the candidates. …
“Here’s the bottom line: All of what Mr. Finchem is talking about is politically motivated and it’s that kinda instability, it’s that kind of unpredictabaility that Arizona and its sound government – the people who are vested in the interest of making sure that we can have predictability in these things for the purposes of business and law and medicine. All of the schools that have their budgeting cycles. Every little bit of our society is run by this idea of a constant election cycle.
“Elections are the golden thread that run through the fabric of our society and if you pull that out, with this unpredictable, chaotic way of looking at things based on the candidates, the entire fabric disintegrates and we can’t afford that kind of unpredictability. Doing it right is what we did. It’s not our fault that he can’t accept one loss.”
Adrian Fontes, Democratic nominee for Arizona Secretary of State, joined MSNBC’s The ReidOut for an interview with Jason Johnson sitting in for Joy Reid.
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Philip Bump of the Washington Post writes, “How far from reality can a top elections official be? Arizona may find out.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/23/arizona-election-denier-finchem/
[No] matter how divergent from reality, the idea that Trump won the election two years ago is clearly not an outlier position on the right. To stand out as exceptional in embracing that position, then, takes something more. Not just expressing skepticism about the results but, say, actively working to undermine them. Continuing to press the case even as the “evidence” of fraud has collapsed. Maybe even committing to taking over a state’s elections system to rework it as you see fit.
To be truly exceptional in this space, then, you need to be someone like Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem (R) — now one election away from taking over as that state’s top elections official next year.
On Thursday, Finchem participated in a brief debate with his Democratic opponent, Adrian Fontes. The discussion didn’t focus primarily on the dull mechanics of managing the state and operating its elections moving forward. Instead, it focused heavily on how Finchem had tried to unwind the last election. And Finchem was the first to raise the issue.
“I’m running for secretary of state to restore honor, to restore integrity, to restore security to the secretary of state’s office,” he began. He later claimed that the election results in some counties were “irredeemably compromised,” including Maricopa County, where Fontes had administered the 2020 vote.
His evidence? Well, he argued that Yuma County’s vote was tainted because of a case involving a former elected official who accepted and submitted other people’s ballots. This, he said, “altered the outcome of Yuma County” — apparently making assumptions about the scale of what occurred (the criminal charges centered on only four ballots) and failing to understand that this occurred in the 2020 primary.
Finchem claimed that they only learned about fraud after the vote was certified, meaning it was too late. But, of course, there is no evidence of fraud in Arizona, in Maricopa County in particular. There have been no arrests, or even credible allegations, of any rampant illegality; there has been no evidence presented showing undeniable flaws in the system. Nor has there ever been.
That latter qualifier is important because it overlaps with another point of debate on Thursday: Finchem’s presence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Fontes, not unexpectedly, repeatedly noted that Finchem was present at the scene of the riot that day, though Finchem has insisted he didn’t know it was underway. (He would also later say he heard the riot was caused by antifa, which it wasn’t.) Asked about being there after the debate, he reiterated what he’d said in a statement at the time: He was “there to deliver an evidence package to Rep. Paul A. Gosar” (R-Ariz.).
It’s not clear what that “package” contained, but it’s not really important. Since that statement was first produced, there has been a lengthy, expensive, thoroughly partisan review of the vote in Maricopa County, home to about 60 percent of the Arizona votes cast in 2020. That review did not determine that Trump actually won — amazingly — but it did gin up a lot of new grist for the just-asking-questions mills. (The county very helpfully then answered those questions.)
Again, though, the point is that Finchem thought he had evidence of fraud then just as he thinks he has evidence now, but that evidence is as ethereal as a ghost. Yet Finchem purports to center those allegations in his decision-making anyway.
Last year, at the outset of his candidacy for secretary of state, Finchem sent out a remarkably frank fundraising email.
“I will protect the elections from the Steal,” it read, “and make sure that Arizona is the Red State it REALLY is!”
The phrase “the Steal” refers to the “Stop the Steal” movement, in which Finchem was an eager participant. He has been linked to Ali Alexander, the right-wing provocateur credited with ginning up the effort/money-making scheme in the wake of the 2020 vote. Finchem spoke at a “Stop the Steal” event in Arizona a month after the election, at which he pledged to prove that “the Steal” had occurred.
“Everybody seems to say, ‘We need to see the smoking gun, we need to see the bullets, we need to see the blood splatter … we need to see the full crime scene,’ ” he said then. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly what we are doing.”
No crime scene, literal or metaphorical, was ever presented. In a recent interview with Time magazine, though, Finchem suggested that he already had all of the evidence he needed. Reporter Charlotte Alter asked him if he would certify a Biden win in 2024. She described his response:
This is actually quite revealing. As I wrote in December 2020, that many Trump supporters knew few or no Biden supporters almost certainly contributed to the sense that Biden’s win was impossible. You heard one refrain regularly from those rejecting Biden’s victory: How could he have gotten 81 million votes? The answer, of course, was that a huge portion of those votes came in large, heavily Democratic cities — places that people like Mark Finchem often don’t live.
The important part of the quote, of course, is that Finchem told Alter that he’d certify a Biden win only in a “fantasy world.” And that’s the reason we’re talking about Finchem at all: He’s poised to have the power to decide whether the results of the election should be upheld.
If he had been similarly empowered in 2020, he would not have certified that election. In February, after months of adjudication and review of the votes in the state, Finchem called for the 2020 results in Maricopa, Pima and Yuma counties to be set aside. It’s not clear what practical effect that would have; Biden would still be president. But it’s worth noting that the purported justifications for this action were largely ones already debunked by Maricopa County.
The “evidence” was there just because Finchem and the others supporting the motion felt the need to make some sort of case. As is often the case, though, the evidence itself didn’t matter any more than it matters which route your car GPS serves up to you. They knew where they were going and didn’t care how they got there. If there was an unexpected roadblock, no problem. Just move around it. Find new “evidence.”
As secretary of state, Finchem could act both before and after an election to shape the outcome. He could limit voting mechanisms to benefit Republicans and he could approve audits or reviews to reach the same end. And he’s been explicit about the justification for doing so: He doesn’t think it’s possible for a Democrat to actually win in the state.
Vote for him, he promised, and he would “make sure that Arizona is the Red State it REALLY is”; that in federal elections in both 2018 and 2020 it wasn’t doesn’t matter. It’s about the destination, not the journey.
Remember, this person will be next in line for Governor should Katie Hobbs decide to take on another government position, or If Kari Lake goes full Ev Mecham on us. If the latter, we can take bets on whether her term last shorter or longer than Mr. Car Dealer.