Earlier this month, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem made a sudden visit to Arizona to discuss “election security,” which she and other Trump administration officials have routinely claimed is being undermined by non-citizen immigrants. When asked by reporters to name a single example of alleged voter fraud, however, she only said: “Oh, I’m sure there’s many of them.” Nevertheless, officials like Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes are not only dealing with confusion and fear stoked by the Trump administration’s declarations, but also directly hostile attempts to take over the state’s elections, including an ultimatum to hand over voter rolls and plans to deploy ICE agents at voting sites.
As both a border state and a battleground between the Democratic and Republican parties, Arizona has been a lightning rod for immigration and election integrity battles long before Donald Trump began his second term. Fontes, who first served as Maricopa County Recorder from 2017 to 2021 and then as the state’s chief election officer since 2023, has become a visible face of opposition against attempts to intimidate and suppress voters by Republicans, which included a much-criticized audit by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on voting machines in the Phoenix metro area.
Now, in the midst of Trump’s second term and a nationwide purge of immigrant workers and families, Fontes told Salon how he is fighting a federal government and political party that is increasingly weaponizing the crackdown to further undermine elections — and shield themselves from angry voters.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
The midterm elections are less than seven months away — from your perspective, what levers does the Trump administration have that they might use to sow confusion and disenfranchise voters?
Trump’s promise was that he was going to crack down on “violent criminal aliens” and non-citizens, and he’s obviously taking it far beyond that. With the blackmail letter they sent to my friends over in the Midwest, we realized that what they were actually doing was intimidating Americans for the purpose of getting the voter rolls. The Trump administration realizes that the power in America is our democracy through our elections, and that’s their number one goal, is to mess with the systems that can take them out of power. Their desperate tactics reveal their weakness: the fact that when they’re not politically popular, they have to subvert elections in order to stay in power, because the elections are where the people exert their power.
“It’s manipulation at best, and it’s nefarious at worst, because what they’re saying is they’re going to make it harder for everybody to vote.”
There are admittedly very, very rare instances of non-citizens who might register or vote, but those instances are vanishingly rare, and it does not justify the otherization of folks who are non-citizens and then saying a non-citizen is threatening an American citizens’ vote. It’s manipulation at best, and it’s nefarious at worst, because what they’re saying is they’re going to make it harder for everybody to vote, just because of these mythological millions of non-citizens who never been proven to actually be voting.
Has the federal crackdown on both non-citizen and citizen immigrants alike amplified a chilling effect where even those eligible to vote might not want to out of concern for their safety? Does your office have any power to challenge some of the more egregious voter suppression methods, like the presence of federal agents at polling sites?
Yes. There’s plenty of folks who I’ve heard from personally, who are concerned, not just for themselves, but for their neighbors, for their friends and for the system writ large. The Trump administration has been very successful in instilling an enormous amount of fear across the country. That’s their currency. They’re trying to take the people out of the process, and that’s the only way they’re going to be able to do exactly what they want to do.
I’ll be really blunt with you: when it comes to challenging the presence of federal agents, I probably wouldn’t talk about those tactics and capacities at this stage of the game, because I don’t want those folks adjusting to our response if they do come out. But I can say is that we’re encouraging folks to vote by mail and to vote early, and avoid all that nonsense.
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We’re also promoting the Voters First Act in the state legislature, which would extend the voter protection zone to our vote centers and our drop boxes to 75 feet, so that folks who are approaching those don’t get harassed, and only elections officials can interact with voters within those spaces.
Critics say the Trump administration has used all manner of justifications to disenfranchise American voters. In the last year, the focus seems to be centered on non-citizen immigrants committing voter fraud. What unique challenges does this present for your office?
Well, the immigration angle is patent bulls**t — and I still haven’t heard any response to my requests from the administration to produce any evidence of widespread non-citizen voting. And I will tell you, just like I’d tell any of your colleagues, I fault the media for not holding Donald Trump’s feet to the fire and asking him directly and demanding directly for the evidence of widespread non-citizen voting, and letting him and his acolytes continue to push this nonsensical idea. Because quite frankly, and I say this with all due respect, the fourth estate has failed miserably to fact check this, at least to the President’s face.
We’ve had documented proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration in Arizona for almost two full decades, before any other state brought that on board. We were one of the earliest states to demand voter ID at the polling places, which is only used by 20 percent of our voters. We do it because it’s the law. So we had Secretary Noem out here telling us that these are things we ought to be doing when really, she’s either woefully misinformed, or she’s maliciously lying in saying that we should be doing these things when she should know we already are.
Has the escalation been putting strain on your office? How is morale among people working in elections in Arizona?
We are angry because they keep getting thrown under the bus as if they’re not doing their jobs when they are. I can tell you right now that I know plenty of Republican elections officials who are pretty upset with the fact that their own partisans are telling people that they’re not doing their jobs when the evidence shows otherwise. We’ve been trying to go back to a permanent early vote list, to have a permanent fund that’s going to help us keep our information technology systems secure. We should be having [the Electronic Registration Information Center] completely funded by the state so that we can continue to maintain our voter rolls to the highest degree possible, the highest degree of accuracy possible.
These are common sense things that everybody seems to want, but the legislature here in Arizona, while they say they want it, they don’t want to fund it.
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You and other critics have said that in whipping up hysteria over immigrant-led voter fraud and acting based on that, Republican governments have purged eligible voters from the rolls. Can you talk more about how the changing ID landscape interacts with this?
Just this August in Biloxi, Mississippi, I presented to the National Association of Secretaries of State what I call the cautionary tale about documented proof of citizenship for voting, and I talked about integration of data systems that weren’t designed for these specific things. I don’t think Motor Vehicle Division databases across the country were designed to verify citizenship. Now, with the advent of REAL ID, some of them have made adjustments — but how exactly are they tracking the requirements for documented proof of citizenship as it pertains to voter registration? What are the policy implications? What does the funding look like? How did how do you actually administer this?
The question really ought to be, does this make sense to have this push if the problem is vanishingly rare in the first place. I mean, let’s face it, we don’t put ADA-required rails on every commode in every bathroom. Why? Because it’s a smaller portion of the population that needs that. So we make accommodations, just like in this instance. The Trump administration is raising the bar to an unrealistic and unreasonable degree on folks who may not be able to obtain the correct IDs or may be misidentified as non-citizens. We’ve already looked at how we’re going to cure those things in Arizona under our systems. It’s a solution looking for a problem, and it just pushes a conspiracy theory to justify the disenfranchisement of American voters, and that’s just flat wrong. That’s why I’m fighting against this.
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Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
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