Arizona Business Search Secretary Of State – Fontes beats Trump-backed Finchem for Arizona secretary of state.
Democrat Adrian Fontes, who previously ran for Arizona’s largest county, has been narrowly chosen to oversee statewide voting as secretary of state, according to a race call from The Associated Press.
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Fontes defeated Republican Mark Finchem, a far-right candidate with ties to the extremist group the Oath Keepers, who was in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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Democrats, current and former election officials and democracy experts made it clear before the election that Finchem voting down this race could lead the state down a dark path.
“Democracy as we know it may not survive in Arizona,” former President Barack Obama warned during a pre-election rally for the state’s Democratic slate.
The race call, which came late Friday, makes Finchem the last election denier to be defeated this cycle in a secretary of state race in a competitive state, after losses by Republican candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico.
Finchem was part of a coalition of GOP secretary of state candidates across the country, all of whom ran on the false premise that the current election system was corrupt. Finchem, who had the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, had called for an overhaul of the Arizona vote that would limit access.
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Finchem criticized the state election administration for continuing the counting on last election day, alluding to some kind of conspiracy involving Fontes.
Now, as the state’s top voting official, he will be faced with how to combat electoral denial in one of the country’s epicenters for it.
Shortly after voting ended in 2020, and at the end of Fontes’ term as county recorder, one of the more famous vote-counting conspiracies, dubbed “SharpieGate,” flourished in Maricopa.
Half a year later, the Cyber Ninjas began their widely discredited “control” of the vote there (which also confirmed that Biden won).
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In an interview with before the vote ended, Fontes said he would not be shy about calling out disinformation about votes.
“We’re going to take off the gloves,” Fontes said. “I’m not afraid to call out election deniers for the liars they are… And I’m also not afraid to let people know that there are not two sides to this conflict. There is one side. There is the American side The other side is illegitimate.” Mark Finchem tells the story of a late-night search for three men suspected of pulling off a string of robberies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, three decades ago.
An officer with the local police department at the time, Finchem stopped a suspicious vehicle, but did not have the evidence needed to make an arrest. When he turned back to his car, he noticed that the trunk of the stopped car was slightly open and got a bad feeling.
That’s how he views the 2020 presidential election, the event that has catapulted him to national prominence and fueled his bid as Arizona’s next secretary of state. Something was wrong, he felt.
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“People see things that they know are just wrong, but they don’t know what,” he said in an interview late last year.
His belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump — absent evidence of significant issues presented in court or enough irregularities from multiple audits to sway the vote — catapulted Finchem, 65, into a bid for the top electoral office of ‘ e state and earned him Trump’s endorsement. Given the role of the Secretary of State in certifying election results, Finchem’s candidacy has drawn national scrutiny as one of the top election deniers running for office in 2022.
He has amassed plenty of material for eager supporters to chew on and alarmed opponents as he campaigned for the November 8 general election.
Headvocates for a radical shift in how elections are conducted, from the abolition of the popular early voting system (with exceptions for absentee ballots for out-of-towners on Election Day) to the posting of ballots online to a switch to embedded ballots with many “anti-fraud” functions.
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He believes ballots should be counted by hand and has argued that the state legislature has the power to set aside the results of presidential elections if lawmakers believe there is illegality in how those results were obtained.
Along with GOP candidate for governor Kari Lake, Finchem sought a preliminary injunction in federal court to block the use of electronic machines in the November election. The judge dismissed the case, but the duo is appealing to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
He vows to ensure Arizona’s election laws are followed, an oblique reference to court rulings that stopped his Democratic opponent, Adrian Fontes, from changing several election procedures while Fontes served as Maricopa County recorder.
Finchem has peppered these policy statements with unapologetic remarks that Democrats are “Marxists”, that former Vice President Mike Pence was part of a coup to oust Trump from office and that what he saw in the US Capitol on January 6, where’ he was present. , was “malicious destruction of property,” but not a riot.
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He is accused that the Democrats are obliged to donors with deep pockets George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, and sign complaints about antisemitism. That criticism is reinforced by Finchem’s association with known anti-Semites, such as his endorsement of a candidate for the Oklahoma Legislature, as well as his endorsement by Andrew Torba, the founder of the white nationalist platform Gab, who has written that Jews control the government .
He won a legislative seat in 2014 on a platform of personal and economic freedom. He described himself as a member of the Oathholders, “committed to limited, constitutional government.” The Oath Keepers are considered an extremist group and were involved in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Finchem was outside the Capitol that day to deliver a speech that was canceled and claims he never went into the Capitol.
Finchem arrived in southern Arizona in 1999, attracted by a job offer from American Airlines to work in its southwest reservation center. He was retired from public safety work as a firefighter and later a police officer in Michigan, where he did some ranching (“raised horses, cows and sheep,” he said) on the side.
“A pretty boring life, that’s why I liked it,” he said of ranching, describing it as “rehab time” from the stress of police work.
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In Arizona, he had a variety of work experience, from an advertising startup called ReadmyRear.com that created banners for the back of cars, to consulting for a clean energy company to real estate. He let his real estate license expire last year, records show.
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He also pursued education beyond the associate of applied science degree in criminal justice that he earned at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. He received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Grand Canyon University in 2019 and recently completed a master’s degree in law and economics from the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. Early last year, he falsely claimed he had a scholarship to the law college, a claim the college refuted.
“There’s always more to know, there’s always more to be fascinated by,” he said, adding the 400-level economics class he took at the UA “was pretty tough.”
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Along his learning path, he earned a Six Sigma certification in process excellence, a credential he believes will serve him well as secretary of state. The Six Sigma is a method to improve efficiency in business operations.
Finchem said he got that “something is wrong” feeling during the 2016 election, which Trump won, and said everyone was cheated.
Benny White, a Republican running for Pima County recorder in 2020, said he never heard Finchem talk about elections when they attended the same campaign events.
But three weeks after the election, Finchem called a meeting at a downtown Phoenix hotel with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to discuss the election results. It fell on the same day that officials certified Arizona’s election results, sealing Joe Biden’s win.
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That Nov. 30, 2020, the meeting made him “the national spokesman for electoral integrity,” he told The Republic.
He says the information he gathered prompted state Senate Republicans to launch an audit of Maricopa County’s election records. That review of released ballots found more votes for Biden than the official record and verified that the county’s vote tabulation machines were not connected to the Internet — scuttling claims by Finchem and other election skeptics that the county rigged the election.
He held a similar hearing in his home base of Pima County in December 2021 and provided what he said was evidence of election fraud to Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
The attorney general’s office confirmed in August that Finchem has not met with state investigators, nor has he provided evidence that he predicted would spark a criminal investigation and a grand jury investigation.
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During this year’s legislative session, Finchem introduced a resolution to win back Arizona’s presidential electors because he claimed the election results in Maricopa,
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