Adrian Fontes: ‘Election Systems Are Not on Autopilot and We Use Technology Every Single Day To Keep Them Updated’

RUSH EXCERPT:

FONTES: “Well, maybe he’s working out of an old phone book, but we use technology that, frankly, here in Arizona is a little bit old and it needs updating. But across the country, folks are doing the work every single day. Think about this at every mvd across the United States of America, people are registering to vote every single day. These are dynamic lists. This stuff changes and it has to be updated. And we have to make sure every single day that our election systems writ large are in place. Now, we can’t help it that most people just notice elections administrators around election time. And that’s okay, because we shouldn’t be the main focus of what people are thinking about. They should take care of their homes and their families and their communities. But the bottom line is this without the kinds of resources that we need to keep these systems updated and keep things moving along, we’re going to have significant problems. But at the end of the day, we’re not getting the resources that we need, particularly here in Arizona from our Republican legislature. And that’s why we’ve proposed. One of the things that you talked about a little bit in your opening is the Arizona voters first act, which would put money into our systems to make sure that we can shore them up and have healthy and robust systems to, I don’t know, maintain the voter rolls, keep security in our it systems, give access to voters, like returning the permanent early voting list. And it’s really ironic where you have 80% of Arizona’s voters voting by mail. And just the other day, on a 17 to 13 partisan vote, our good friends on the other side of the aisle voted for a measure that would kill ballot by mail voting in Arizona. Completely wild. It’s just insane. And I don’t know where they’re getting their information that this is popular from because it’s not. And and and look, it was invented. Mail-in voting was created in Arizona by”