Adrian Fontes doesn’t wear a white coat, and he wouldn’t pretend to be a doctor. But as Arizona’s secretary of state, he talks about election work the way a public-health official might talk about getting ahead of an outbreak. His enemy isn’t a virus. It’s the mistrust and misinformation that seem to bloom every time voters go to the polls. He likes the metaphor of inoculation: the more people he can “vaccinate” with correct, easy-to-understand facts about how elections are run, the fewer people will get infected by the lies that float around, often deliberately, every election season. “You never know what’s the next little monster that’s going to rear its ugly head,” Fontes said. “But the reality is, the effort we are engaged in now are confidence builders against the potential of those little monsters. And we prepare folks to understand how the systems work so that they, themselves, are better equipped to deal with the potential questions.” His answer has been to pour energy into building Arizona.Vote, a website designed not to argue with people, but to arm them. If voters know where to look for the truth, he believes, rumors will find it much harder to settle.
That distrust he is fighting isn’t just an Arizona problem, but Arizona has become a strange bellwether for how election anxiety shapes politics. Former President Donald Trump has spent years insisting, without convincing proof, that vote-by-mail systems are unreliable, even though he himself has cast mail ballots. In Arizona, some still cling to the belief that Trump was the real winner of the 2020 race, even though the official count showed Biden ahead by 10,457 votes. That belief led Republican state senators to hire Cyber Ninjas, an organization with no real experience in election audits, to go through hundreds of thousands of Maricopa County ballots in search of evidence that the 2020 race had somehow been stolen. The famous, irregular undertaking did not end the matter. In the end, the hand count conducted at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix actually found it, not the same way, but by a slightly larger margin than the machines had shown. That should have been a resolving moment for any reasonable person. But the smell of suspicion never fully goes away. Fontes sees looks like the room of the monster he’s trying to prevent. If people don’t know how the process actually works, they’re more likely to believe that anything strange is also something sinister.
That’s why so much of the information on Arizona.Vote is not glamour or grand theories; it’s more like a public library siting. The website explains basic but essential details: when registration closes, what to do if you want an early ballot but you haven’t already signed up for the Active Early Voting List, and what forms of identification you need to vote in person. For many people, that’s enough. They simply want to know their ballot will count. It also gives voters a way to track their ballot through the process, so they can see that it arrived, that it was accepted, and that it was counted. The unexciting part of election work is the part that protects democracy most. Fontes also wants to prepare voters for what he calls the “knuckleheads” who make sweeping, false claims. He knows that if there’s a quiet afternoon with no news, somebody might pop up and say that Arizona’s voting system is somehow rigged. The website doesn’t hide from those questions. It is meant to give an answer before panic arises. By making the process feel less mysterious, he’s trying to create a little immune system in people’s heads, one that can resist a rumor because they already know exactly how the election was carried out.
The substantive reality of election safety in Arizona is not hard to explain, and Fontes wants to make it plain. For one thing, Arizona does not announce on some internet-connected system with no evidence. All votes in the state are cast paper ballots. Those ballots are fed into tabulating machines, which count sheets but the people who use have no internet connection. Rumors say otherwise, but the machines are not online and not open to hacking from the outside. Fontes says the tabulators must also undergo mandatory “logic and accuracy testing,” where a batch of sample ballots with known results is sent through the machines to see if the numbers come out correctly. That is not a random, rough practice; it’s a predictable, verifiable check. And after every election, Arizona law requires a random hand count audit of a certain number of races in a certain number of precincts, chosen by party officials. A particular list of those ballots is counted by real human hands, and then the totals are compared to the machine totals to make sure they match. It isn’t a twelve-step mystery. It’s a public check that is open to participants from both parties. For Fontes, this is the kind of information that should inoculate large numbers of voters. If someone tells you that the results are invented, you can say: Why vote these paper ballots? Show me the test. Show me the hand-count audit. It’s much easier to ask the question.
Yet, in the real Arizona political world, there are still public officials who don’t accept that machine-count has enough. Two Cochise County supervisors, both Republicans, were indicted after the 2022 election for trying to do a full hand count on their own. One took a plea deal; the other remains fighting charges. In Mohave County, Supervisor Ron Gould, also a Republican and also a full hand-count supporter, petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court to protect himself from prosecution by the Democratic attorney general, arguing that his actions should be immune from legal liability. The court didn’t offer him cover. And just has recently as the Sunday before the article was written, Republican Abe Hamadeh was still claiming that he had won the 2022 race for Attorney General by a margin thinner than 10 votes, despite official result showing Maggie Mayes beat him. He argued that then-secretary of state Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, had to take the blame. These claims are not just remote background noise. They have already affected actual elections. Stephen Richer, the sitting Maricopa County recorder, lost his Republican primary in 2024 to Justin Heap, who used “historically low voter confidence” as a corner of his campaign and went on to win the general election. Faith in elections has become a campaign trail weapon.
Not even election odd belief, but when elected officials plant purposeful uncertainty, it trickles through the whole system. Arizona Republican House member Alexander Kolodin, who is hoping to unseat Fontes in the next election, repeated that attack in a televised debate only recently. “There’s no doubt that confidence in our elections here in Arizona is at an all-time low,” he said. “And the responsibility sits squarely on the shoulders of Secretary Fontes.” Fontes has heard that criticism without anger. He knows it’s easy to blame the person who’s watching over the rules, especially when the rules don’t always produce the message you want. But he is not in the business of convincing everyone to win every single soul; that’s not the point. The point is to create enough awareness, enough quiet preparation, that a voter can step into the booth and trust that their neighbors’ votes are just as safe as their own. Government soon after a long season of message can feel fragile. But Fontes doesn’t want to leave voters feeling helpless. He also wants to give them a place to go, a method to ask questions, and a set of open sources that will answer that. It’s not a flashy strategy, but it may be the most durable one. Mocked as “preparation” maybe. When the next little monster shows up, he hopes his side has vaccinated enough beating hearts. The monsters will always be with us, but they don’t have to infect the people.