Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes Reassures Arizona Voters Ahead of 2026 Elections

A United States Supreme Court decision gutting section two of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Arizona Republican Legislative and County Leaders looking to eliminate mail-in voting, redraw congressional districts to make the Grand Canyon state an apartheid one, and make the voting experience uncomfortable for people with disabilities. 

Trump’s “Justice” Department wanting access to Arizona voters’ private information. 

In an interview with Blog for Arizona, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes addressed many of these issues, seeking to reassure Grand Canyon state voters that the electoral system of checks and balances is secure and the mail-in ballot system is still very reliable if people follow the recommended deadlines and ignore the false propaganda from the Trump-MAGA extreme right.

Please read the questions and Secretary Fontes’s responses below. 

Mr. Secretary, please tell Arizonans what important dates they need to be mindful of in the voting process for this year. 

“Well, there are two very important dates specifically.

The first is the primary election, which is currently set for the 21st of July, that moved up. 29 days before that is the voter registration deadline (June 22) for the July 21st primary election. And of course, the big one is going to be November 3rd.

That is our general election date. This time around, the voter registration deadline is October 5, 2026.  

And those two dates are really the critical ones. 

What is the mail-in deadline for the November 3 election?

“We like to make sure that folks have that ballot in the mail at a minimum of seven days. To be comfortable for 10 days, but because it’s 27-day early voting, folks can start bringing them in if they’d rather not send it in the mail as soon as they get it. What I’ve been telling folks is once you get your ballot in, send it back within 72 hours. That to me is a good rule of thumb, and it’s a really great way for folks to understand how important it is to get your ballots in early so you don’t have to worry about it too much. And there’s the added benefit that campaigns eventually will find out that you’ve already voted, and they’ll stop bothering you, which, for those of us who vote all the time, I think is a little added bonus on the back side.”

The Supreme Court has not handed down its ruling yet on mail-in ballots delivered after Election Day.  Is there a message you want to send to voters here? 

“So, Arizona is not a postmarked state. We’re an in-hand state. That means if election officials don’t have the ballot in hand by 7 p.m. on election day, those ballots are not counted. So unlike other states that accept postmarked ballots after election day, we won’t have any adjustments based on that case as to that particular point.”

Please click here to watch Secretary Fontes New Year’s message on Arizona being an in-hand state.

In an April 22nd social media post, you spoke about how Arizona’s electoral system has many checks and balances at the county and Board of Supervisors levels. To what extent are you concerned that the current Maricopa County recorder, and if there are any other county recorders, may be a hindrance to the electoral process this year? Please explain.

“Well, I’m not concerned about any of them being a hindrance because of the checks and balances. I think that’s critically important for folks to know. The county recorders are in charge of voter registration, and they’re in charge of early voting according to our statutes. The county boards of supervisors are in charge of election day. They’re in charge of getting the polling places, training the poll workers, and doing the ballot tabulation. And so, you know, there have been many times in Arizona’s not-too-distant history where we’ve had tension between those two offices. You don’t have to go too far back to remember the pretty vivid tension between the Pima County recorder and the former election director down there, so much so that they literally had a wall in the building through which they would pass the ballots back and forth. That having been said, that is a check and balance on our system. And so, you know, for things to go wrong, you’ve got to have a whole host of things going wrong, not just one or two bad actors.”

“And so, our systems are built that way purposefully to ensure that the voters can have confidence in the outcomes. And to this day, I think we’ve done a pretty good job across the entire state.”

Are you prepared to fight the Trump administration if it appeals the federal judge’s decision prohibiting the Department of Justice from accessing Arizona’s private voter information? Please explain.

“From day one, we’ve been very adamant about protecting the personal identifying information of Arizona’s voters. We understand this to be a very popular stance among not just voters, but everybody in Arizona. And we have a Trump-appointed conservative judge who agrees with us. She agreed that under Title III of the NBRA, the Justice Department was not entitled to even ask the question in the first place. And that also bolsters our arguments under the Privacy Act of 1974. And of course, the state law prohibitions against turning over these data are still in place.”

“And so regardless of what the Department of Justice thinks about the correctness or incorrectness of that ruling, we got the ruling, and we’re going to back it up through the appellate process if necessary.”

Please tell the readers how the recent Pinal versus Fontes ruling could affect people with disabilities in Pinal and perhaps other Arizona counties.

“Well, reducing access has always been a nonstarter for me, and where folks with disabilities have, generally speaking, a lot of them have mobility issues. I think it’s unfortunate that the Board of Supervisors down there utilizes the strawman argument of creating vote centers to say that this is one of the reasons they were going to prohibit access to voters with disabilities. If you actually look at the number of folks who utilize the equipment that allows voters with disabilities to vote easily, what you’ll see is that polling place by polling place, you might have one or two people on even election day utilizing that equipment.”

“So this false notion that letting anybody vote anywhere is going to clog up and disenfranchise voters with disabilities, that’s just balderdash. The bottom line is I disagree with the court’s ruling, but since we’re so close to the election season, this is a fight for another time. We are happy not to appeal and cost the taxpayers more dollars, but we have other ways of remedying this situation in the future.”

So you don’t see anyone with disabilities being hindered this November? 

“I do, and that is a choice of the Pinal County Board of Supervisors, and if there are voters with disabilities who are disenfranchised, it falls on that board, and it doesn’t fall on me. I’ve been continuing to advocate for that access, and I will continue to do so in the future.

Is there nothing you can do to Pinal to get them to be accommodating? 

“You can only lead a horse to water.”

In the budget negotiations, current impasse at the State Capital, please tell the readers at least three areas you need to have fully funded for the next fiscal year. 

“Well, there are really a couple that need to be fully funded.”

“Number one is the election special item. At this stage of the game, the budget that the governor vetoed, we’re glad she vetoed it, only funded half of what we needed for our elections, which is insane. The Republican legislature screams and yells about elections, but they don’t want to fund the core function of the same thing, so budgets reflect priorities, and if it really is a priority, then they should be fully funding it.”

“Another area I think that needs to be fully funded is the address confidentiality program in my office, which protects victims of stalking and domestic violence from predators, and we lost federal funding several years ago, and we’ve been able to sort of use a variety of fiscal band-aids over the last couple years to keep that program funded, but it needs permanent state funding to protect these vulnerable populations in Arizona, and I think the other thing that it isn’t a funding ask, it’s simply a shift in where the money goes. You know, our business services could be for the most part self-funded as far as our technology goes, just the way county recorder’s offices have a special IT fund that comes out of part of the filing fees. We want to maintain the filing fees that we collect in the office so that we can pay for security upgrades, networking upgrades, and all that sort of stuff instead of having to battle year in and year out the political fight down at the legislature. We can just do the job of doing the job for small businesses, which is, I think, something that most Arizonans could agree on.” 

Warren Peterson and some other Republicans are considering going to court to require the redistricting commission to reconvene and redraw Arizona’s congressional maps, calling the current configuration racist. Two-part question here. First, do you think that effort will get very far? Second, are you worried that Republicans would succeed in making Arizona, like attempts in other states, an apartheid-like system that can last for years, if not decades? Please explain.

“Well, I don’t think it’ll go very far to answer the first part of the question. And the second part of the question is, I don’t think Warren Peterson should be spending taxpayer dollars trying to redraw maps to save his party from a crushing defeat in November. The only reason that this sort of thing is happening is that folks are afraid of political outcomes that won’t go their way.”

“That’s not how we do things in America. This gerrymandering fight, Arizona has been insulated from because we have an independent redistricting commission. We were the first in the country to have one. And we have kept our lines relatively solid outside of the political fight. And I think, I think we should all respect that instead of trying to challenge it because of the politics out of Washington, D.C.”

So, you’re not worried that what’s happening in Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, or Louisiana happening here? 

“Well, no, because we don’t have any statewide executive officers that are trying to curry favor with the current administration in Washington, D.C. So, no, I’m not too worried about it.” 

Is there anyone in your office you would like to recognize for their positive contributions during the first part of 2026? It could be more than one person.

“I’d like to recognize my communication director, Calli Jones. I think the public communication that we’ve had of late, particularly on social media, has been widely commented on and lauded across the state. And so it is, it is Calli and her team, number one, that deserve kudos.”

“I’d also like to, you know, really recognize our state election director, Lisa Mara. Lisa is the former Republican election director in Cochise County. She was the one who was really fighting that Board of Supervisors so that they would follow the law, and she ultimately was vindicated in court. And she is a stand-up professional who continues to serve the voters in the state with little to no public recognition. And so, I think she’s done an outstanding job.”

“Both of these folks reflect the bipartisan nature of my office and how we continue to take talent from all political areas and make sure we’re serving all of Arizona, whether it’s on the public-facing side or whether it’s on, you know, the policy and administrative side that Lisa represents. It’s important to have a balanced team because we have a pretty politically diverse state, to say the least. So hopefully all voices are being heard.”

Is there anything not covered in the first seven questions that you’d like the readers to know about Arizona elections in 2026, or your experience in the Secretary of State’s office over the first five months of the year?

“Well, a couple of minor things. Number one, I think folks shouldn’t be as worried about the threatened shenanigans in the fall because we’ve got options.”

“In Arizona, 80% of our voters vote by mail and never see the inside of a polling place. And every eligible voter can get their ballot mailed to them and track it as it not only comes to them, but also as it gets back to the election department in their county. So, you know, I’m hoping folks won’t succumb to the threats, but if they want to kind of just stay away from those shenanigans, they can sign up and get their ballot in the mail.”

“The second thing sort of dovetails off of that. Look, there’s been a lot of undue exertion of power and rumors against our elections coming out of Washington, D.C., and the reason there is, is very simple. The folks who are trying to intimidate voters to keep them from voting understand the power of the vote. They understand that as a nation of people, our votes really, really matter. And if our votes didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of it with the redistricting efforts and the other efforts against voters.”

“So folks should really understand they have a hell of a lot more power than some of the political players out there would want them to believe. And they need to capitalize on that power. They need to stay motivated and use that power so that their voices are heard. Because when we hear more voters voting and have more of those opinions out there, then we get a truer sense of what America, of what Arizona, really thinks. So, you know, by narrowing the scope of voters, you’re narrowing that voice. And that’s not what we need.

We need to hear from more voters. We need to hear from all of the folks who are eligible or at least as close as we can get so that we can have a healthy democracy and leaders that actually represent the majority, the real majority of voters.”