Right now on Sunday square off is Arizona ready for the 2024 elections.
I'll ask the state's top elections officer Adrian Fontes,
how artificial intelligence could mess with voters
and whether he's prepared for what might happen after the November vote.
Also on today's show
why Carrie Lake could be fighting a defamation lawsuit
in court while she campaigns for the US Senate.
Our political insiders give us their top takeaways from
Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs State of the state.
What can Hobbs get done in 2024
and former Republican candidate for Governor Karen Taylor Robeson showed up on the
house floor during Hobbs speech was KTR warming up for a 2026 R.
Governor Katie Hobbs delivered a 4500 word speech
about her priorities for the state this year,
an election year with Arizona in the national spotlight.
Not one of those words on Monday in the speech was elections or voting.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has a lot of thoughts about our elections.
He's overseeing his first statewide election this year.
Welcome back to square off. Thanks for having me again.
Don't wanna put you on the spot, but I, I mentioned what the governor's speech,
state of the state speech because I got a lot
of comments and calls that elections weren't in it.
If you were giving that speech, what would you have said about elections in 2024?
And what we need to be mindful of.
Well, it's not what I would have said,
it's what I have been saying and we'll continue to say we are working on
not just securing our elections but making sure the
folks who actually run our elections are well trained,
uh well resourced
uh and have sort of that communication infrastructure around them to support
uh that activity that happens at our 15 counties because
that's really where the action is for our elections.
And a quick civics lesson here for folks.
We call you this
state's top elections officer.
What are you responsible for and what are the counties responsible for?
Well, imagine that elections in Arizona are like a major sports league,
right? I'm the commissioner. We set forth the rules.
Uh We qualify folks, we check the equipment to make sure everything's good to go.
And it's the counties out there are 15 teams.
They're the ones that take care of the ballots.
A lot of the candidate stuff, they take care of uh the polling places,
training poll workers.
Almost all of the election activities
in administering the elections happen at the counties.
We regulate those activities. We are engaged in some campaign finance stuff.
We take in a lot of the petitions
uh for initiatives, for example, and then distribute them out to the counties.
So we handle a lot of the statewide stuff,
but the vast majority of the actual work of elections happens at our counties.
What are we gonna see in election enforcement just in,
in the way elections are carried out this year
that reflect the lessons learned in 2020
2022. And the reality of what's been going on with election workers and
administrators.
Well, first and foremost, from myself and from my office,
you're gonna see a much more assertive attitude
against folks who are lying about elections,
right?
Because what they're doing is creating mistrust between regular citizens where
there shouldn't be any uh none of the allegations about fraud,
none of the big lie has been proven true.
So my office is gonna take a much more assertive attitude
against folks, whether they are elected officials or not.
Uh When they do lie, we're gonna be calling it out
a second.
We're gonna be enhancing as we have a lot
of the training for elections officials to make sure
uh that a lot of the new people that have
come on board because of the losses that we've had
uh have the training uh that they need. Uh
We've got a fellowship program where we're gonna be
engaging some of the counties and providing some students to
help with some of those uh jobs and we're
gonna be innovating as far as communication is concerned.
A lot more consultation with our uh Native American tribes.
Uh A lot more work uh with um traditionally underserved communities.
Uh And so I think voters are gonna also
in the 13 counties of Greater Arizona, outside of Pima and Maricopa.
We're hoping to roll out the ballot tracking system
where they can get the same text messages.
Uh that Maricopa County voters and Pima County voters have had.
We're looking forward to testing that soon and rolling it out in the fall.
Seriously.
Absolutely. It's one,
it's 11 of the features I love about our life.
It's one of the most popular features that uh we created in Maricopa County.
We brought it to Arizona.
Uh and it was a campaign promise of mine to
get all of the rest of the counties involved.
I helped Pima County put it together when I was the chief deputy down there.
Now, as Secretary of State, I think all of our voters should have the benefit
to be able to track their own ballots.
You use the word assertive to describe how you're
gonna respond to what you perceive as misinformation.
What does assertive mean in practice, what will that look like?
Well, we're gonna really uh challenge folks to come out
uh with some facts. Uh Le Let me give you a for,
I mean, we're talking lawsuits or just you getting up there on the stump and saying,
calling people out. Well, we're not gonna, we're not gonna play the role of victim,
right? What we're gonna do is we're gonna come right out
and, and, and speak directly
uh to the voters and we're gonna challenge folks that are saying, oh, well,
this is a problem.
Let me give you a for example, when somebody says, oh,
you've got a problem with voting machines in Arizona.
Guess what? We don't have voting machines in Arizona. We vote on paper ballots.
Every ballot in Arizona has always been cast on paper ballots.
You saying voting machines is a lie.
So that's the kind of assertiveness that
we're gonna have in our communication strategy
because the bottom line is this, folks are tired of getting jerked around,
they're tired of getting misled. They don't know who to trust.
We are the trusted information folks.
We're the folks in the election administration
world at the counties and at the state
who are gonna give you the info you need so that you can ensure your vote is counted.
How are you preparing for?
What might happen after the November vote if Donald
Trump or Carrie Lake or their party's nominees,
we can safely assume they are not going to dec uh concede defeat.
Uh We saw the shenanigans after 2022 and 2020.
How are you preparing for all of that?
Well, look, the sore loser is, is another thing that a lot of citizens are, are,
are sick and tired of right
folks who are invested
in Arizona, understand that we have run good elections all along.
We know that there's never been any widespread fraud and we
know that these assertions come from sort of the sore loser crowd
and it doesn't matter what side of the aisle they're on,
we're gonna back up our election officials in each of our
15 counties who are the folks that actually run our elections.
And we're gonna continue that assertive communication push
through uh not just uh the primary,
uh the presidential preference election in, in March,
the primary in August but into November and beyond.
Because the truth of the matter is this
our elections officials do good work,
always done good work and they deserve to be defended.
These are folks who are out there,
uh you know, in Clifton and Saint John's and in Yuma,
they should not get beaten up because they're doing good work.
They should be recognized for that good, that good work.
Uh And they, they, they shouldn't be lied about a
few weeks ago.
You and I talked about uh the potential
impact of artificial intelligence on the 2024 election.
You mentioned uh an exercise with other elections, official
officials in which a deep fake of you
uh was created.
What was that like?
And tell us how that kind of thing could play out in the coming months.
Well,
we created a tabletop exercise the way a lot of folks
in the military and in law enforcement do their trainings.
We ran through
two different scenarios. One was uh uh months leading up to election day
and another one was Election day itself. We had over 200 participants
from elections offices across Arizona State,
federal and local law enforcement agencies,
equipment managers, safety managers,
county managers were actually there as well as supervisors
and running through these scenarios,
we utilized one of the tools that we think
might get exploited and that is artificial intelligence.
Now there are some good things about it and there are some
nefarious uses that can be exploited because of the nature of it.
And A I really, I don't think is something to be scared of.
It's really an amplifier for what's already happening.
You get bad social media posts that get spread
A I can spread it faster. Uh You get some bad information
that's created out there.
A I can create more of it so
they create
an amplifier and can create it using your image
and your voice, they can create it, using my image and my voice,
they can create it using your image and your voice because
there's plenty of video and audio of us on the internet. They can capture that
and generate us either you or me or anybody
else saying some stuff that might mislead voters.
And so what we're asking folks to do and it's part of our training
is to double check and triple check.
If somebody's asking, for example, for sensitive information,
if somebody from my office who is purporting to be
a security officer is calling a county office and saying,
hey, we want some of this
uh log in and password stuff. Their job isn't to just give it.
Their job is to double check again and make sure that that is a legitimate request.
These are ways that we're just covering the basics.
If we just stick to the basics,
we're gonna be in pretty good shape regardless of the threats that A I poses
you're running is the presidential preference election on March 19th.
You have a message to all our voters.
I do and what I'd love to tell all of Arizona voters.
Our presidential preference election,
our primary March 19th is a closed election.
Only registered Democrats and registered Republicans are eligible
to vote.
Uh in the past, you've heard state officials say something otherwise it's not true.
And if you want to vote in that election and I hope you want to,
you can change your registration before February 20th
and then switch it back.
Uh If, if you wanna do that. All right, take care of that Adrian Fontes.
Thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.