Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer have found common cause since a bitter 2020 face-off
Adrian Fontes, left-right, and Stephen Richer talk with attendees after an event at Valley Bar in Phoenix, Arizona, Feb. 8, 2023. Fontes and Richer, both attorneys by trade, are temperamentally almost polar opposites. | Zach Montellaro/POLITICOPHOENIX — Election officials don’t normally draw standing-room-only crowds in basement music halls. But the noise around elections in Arizona is anything but normal right now.
But Richer voted for Fontes in 2022 to be secretary of state, he told POLITICO in an interview the day before the event. “If you would have told me that two years ago, I would have been very confused as to what had happened,” Richer said. “But then again, what’s happened over the last two years is very confusing to me, and is very exceptional.”
“It’s not often that you find yourself in a position to really evolve a lot on the way that you see someone,” Fontes said at the event at the bar. The relationship between secretary of state and Maricopa recorder is “almost a marriage that you have to go through,” said Helen Purcell, who served as Maricopa recorder for decades before Fontes defeated her in 2016. “You are responsible for different things,” she said, noting that she had worked very closely with secretaries of state on implementing the state’s voter registration system and the state manual setting election policy.Fontes is a gregarious and charming Marine Corps veteran.
“They have no choice but to figure out a way together. They’re both reasonable, decent people,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director of the voter advocacy group All Voting is Local, who also served on the Fontes transition team and works regularly with both offices. “Reasonable, decent people, whether they had a contentious race or not, are going to put their best foot forward.”
But what has bound them, both say, is respect for the voters’ will in elections at the end of the day, and their staunch opposition to the lies of stolen elections in the state.
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