Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Emily Levy, founder and director of the voting watchdog group Scrutineers, were the guest speakers at the Democrats of the Red Rocks’ monthly breakfast meeting at the Sedona Community Center on Friday, July 21.

Both called for increased transparency in elections and expressed their support for the publication of ballot images.

Emily Levy of Scrutineers

Appearing via Zoom before Fontes arrived from Tucson, Levy discussed her experiences volunteering for the Election Protection Coalition in 2004 when Massachusetts senator John Kerry was running for president.

“People were saying that we felt like the election had been stolen,” Levy said. “That seems like a funny thing to say now, especially since 2020, but it just felt wrong.”

“Since 2000, states were really pushed to move to electronic systems where computers that are owned by private corporations and that don’t reveal the source code of their software count our votes in secret,” Levy continued. “Most of these companies are very closely tied to the Republican Party. Basically, it’s a giant black box where all votes go in and results come out and we don’t get to see how those things are related to each other.”

“Most of what they’re saying is garbage or worse,” Levy said of what she described as “the MAGA faction of the Republican Party,” “but they have one thing right, and that thing is, our election system is not transparent and people cannot tell simply by looking at the election results whether the votes were counted fairly or not, and that is really concerning.

“We can’t simply trust the computers.”

Levy said this represents an opportunity that the Democratic Party has been failing to exploit: “Now we’ve got some people on the left and some people on the right both saying the same thing, that we need elections where people can tell their votes were counted fairly.

“What I see happening instead is that people, particularly in the Democratic Party, are doubling down on ‘our elections are safe, everything’s fine’ … For years, the Democratic Party has taken the stance that if people knew about the problems with the security of our elections, they wouldn’t vote.”

Resource for Election Officials

Fontes described the Arizona Secretary of State’s office when he took it over as being “underfunded and starved of resources,” although he quickly added, “That’s not to disparage any of the prior secretaries.”

He laid the responsibility for the funding shortage on the Arizona State Legislature instead.

“The only reason that we actually ended up at the secretary’s office getting some money is because former secretary of state Ken Bennett and I have a great relationship,” Fontes said.

Bennett served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2015 and is now the District 1 state senator representing Sedona and the Verde Valley.

“And out of his bucket of pork, he decided Arizona’s elections were going to be a little bit of a pork project for him. Thank goodness for Ken Bennett.”

The secretary contrasted his own lack of funding with “the $15 million that got sent to the rodeo in Prescott. I was asking for $4.8 [million]. My ask and the attorney general’s ask would have been paid for by that rodeo.”

Fontes then set out a vision for his office “to become a rich resource” for election officials in the absence of institutional memory at the local level.

“We’re sort of like the commissioner’s office of the NFL,” Fontes said. “We set the rules. We make sure they’re all playing by the same rulebook. We make sure that the field is level.”

Fontes and his officials are working on producing a new election manual, which is currently out for review by the counties before going through a public comment phase. Fontes said he expected the draft manual to be on Gov. Katie Hobbs’ desk a month early and ready in time for the 2024 election cycle.

“We [also] increased the level of scrutiny that new election equipment receives in Arizona,” Fontes added. “We invited the Republicans and the Democrats, and I think we invited the Libertarians as well, to come and sit in while the committee was actually doing the testing on the new software systems themselves in our office. Why did we do that? Transparency … It’s just better practice for folks to know more.”

In response to an audience question about whether he was pursuing a statewide version of the text and email notification system he created as Maricopa County recorder, Fontes said, “Not only is it possible, it’s coming.

“We’re not making any public announcements from the office yet, because we’ve got to deal with 13 different systems that we support across the state, but we already have the technology … It is coming. We should have it for 2024.”

‘Publish the Ballots’

“Publish the ballots,” Fontes said, noting that he and Bennett both endorsed a recent bill to do just that. “Take the image of the ballots, which every system in Arizona is capable of taking an image of the ballots, and just put them online. Pretty simple.”

“There’s some people who say ‘Everybody’s going to do their own little audit.’ Good,” Fontes said. “If that’s what it takes to rebuild some of the civic faith that has been purposefully eroded by the enemies of democracy, OK. I thought this was a good idea before those SOBs were doing their stuff.”

“People say, ‘What if somebody signs their ballot?’ Well, it’s their choice. Some people jaywalk … Who are we to be so patronizing to the voters and say, ‘No, no, no, you are all too dumb to know that if you sign your ballot, somebody might see who you voted for.’ The fact [is] that your vote is private; you own it, and you can give it up.”

Fontes told the audience that “the identity of the voter is separated from the physical ballot itself … You don’t sign the ballot. You sign the ballot envelope. You can’t publish the envelopes, that’s already against the law.”

He added that Mongolia, which publishes its ballot images, has a 98% confidence rate in its electoral system, but that the Arizona governor and some legislators opposed a similar measure because “that information is already available to the public and they didn’t want more — easier — access to that information even though it’s already publicly available. Does that make sense?”

“I heard what you said, but it doesn’t make sense,” Sedona Vice Mayor Holli Ploog said.

In reply to a question about the possibility of ballot lawsuits, “I’m not afraid of that fight,” Fontes said. “They’re all going to lose. They’ve all lost so far … Let them waste their money and spin their wheels.”

Party Affairs

“You can have a significant impact here, especially when we make sure to run Democrats for every single available office,” Fontes urged attendees. “When you’ve got Oathkeepers and antiSemites running at the top of the Republican ticket, people are going to run away from that, and they’re going to need somewhere to go, Democrats … Why aren’t you running?”

“Not all Republicans are voting straight down the ballot anymore,” Fontes said, referring to recent races in Maricopa County. “When you look at the math, we had to have a bunch of Republicans voting for us.”

When asked, Fontes declined to discuss the Democratic Party’s pending lawsuit against his office for registering the No Labels Party, but did comment that “the fact that they’re suing this office — think about that — to keep the other party off the ballot — I don’t think it’s good. We should take those resources and get out there and register more Democrats and run more candidates and actually win the popular vote.”

Fontes then called the new No Labels Party “a front for extremism as far as anybody can tell.”

“We should have faith in our fellow citizens,” Fontes said. “It’s the loss of faith that we have in one another that’s the macro problem … Once we get better people in government, we can adjust the systems appropriately.”

“We’ve got to keep an eye on our friends on the other side of the aisle,” he added.

When asked about running for governor in eight years, Fontes said, “I would love to win the lottery by then. You like how I evaded that question? That’s political talent right there.”