The state’s chief election official has a message for the U.S. Department of Justice: We don’t need to be reminded to comply with laws ensuring only citizens cast a ballot in Arizona.
And, no, we don’t need your help.
“Arizona has a long history of adherence to voter registration requirements,” Adrian Fontes wrote in a new letter to William Mohrman, an attorney in the agency’s Civil Rights Division. “Indeed, Arizona has required those registering to vote to provide satisfactory evidence of United States citizenship for more than two decades.”
All this comes a week after Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who is Mohrman’s boss, sent a letter to Fontes threatening to prosecute election workers in Arizona who knowingly leave noncitizens on voter rolls or facilitates them receiving and casting ballots.
Dhillon warned that federal law “obviously makes it unlawful for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.”
“State election officers, including the chief election officer of the state, could be criminally prosecuted” for aiding and abetting violations of various federal laws, she wrote, like letting aliens falsely and willfully represent themselves as citizens, as well as actually voting in federal races.
Dhillon, in that July 7 letter, said her agency is willing to assist Arizona in complying with federal laws. And she asked him to respond to Mohrman to explain how he would do that.
Fontes, in his response obtained by Capitol Media Services, said there’s nothing to tell — beyond what the state already is doing.
“Arizona’s 15 counties will continue to carry out their duties under federal and state law to determine voter eligibility and maintain current and accurate voter registration lists,” he wrote.
And Fontes said if federal officials have any questions they are free to review the 468 page state Elections Procedures Manual — he even sent a link — which he said has step-by-step procedures about voter registration and list maintenance.
Fontes also sniffed at offers by the DOJ to help.
“It can trust my office and the highly trained and dedicated election officials in each of Arizona’s 15 counties to carry out our duties in accordance with the law and the oath we all have taken,” he wrote.
President Donald Trump has made a series of baseless claims about election security and integrity since he lost the 2020 election. But even with his 2024 win, he has reignited the issue ahead of this year’s midterms.
And there is no sign the president is going to let up.
Trump is set to deliver an address to the country on Thursday where the president has said he would share “really, really big news” about elections.
Fontes, who has engaged with — and won — various battles with the administration, said he will be watching willing to comment. And he has not proven shy.
“It is insulting to insinuate that the good people at our county recorders’ offices across the state are not doing their jobs correctly,” he said after receiving the letter from Dhillon last week, saying election officials will follow the law, “not directions that come from political rhetoric or intimidation.”
Fontes most recently fought in federal with the Trump administration and its efforts to take greater control of elections.
Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Brnovich tossed out a demand by the DOJ to access the unredacted records of Arizona’s nearly 5 million registered voters. The judge concluded that the federal agency was not entitled to anything that is not already public.
More recently, another federal judge shut down a bid by the Trump administration to create a national voter registration database and then instruct the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the ballots of only those on the list.
U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan said that would block access to voting simply because a state “declines or fails to certify a list.”
And that came weeks after another federal judge blocked the administration from overhauling the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to make it easier for states to use it to compare to their voter registration rolls. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said there are problems with the SAVE database, saying federal officials “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
All this comes against the backdrop of claims by Democracy Docket, founded by Democratic attorney Marc Elias, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was planning to send agents to polling places this fall.
Calli Jones, spokeswoman for Fontes, said that her office is monitoring but has heard nothing definite about such plans.
