2022 Election: Ballot counting continues for various Arizona statewide races

PHOENIX - Besides governor, voters in Arizona have cast their vote for various other statewide offices.

Secretary of State

Democrat Adrian Fontes won the top elections post in Arizona on Friday, defeating Republican rival Mark Finchem who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and who said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s win in the state.

The Associated Press projected his win after new polling numbers came in on Friday night.

Fontes, who formerly oversaw parts of the election system in Arizona’s most populous county, had said Republican Mark Finchem represented a danger to democracy if he had won. The secretary of state, working with the governor and attorney general, has broad authority to rewrite the state’s election rules and plays a role in the certification of results.

Fontes' win marks a political comeback for a former marine and attorney who was defeated in his reelection campaign two years prior.

In 2020, Fontes was defeated by Republican Stephen Richer in that year’s general election. Fontes oversaw parts of Maricopa County elections that year, but not the actual vote counting or polling sites.

Finchem and other Republicans, meanwhile, have contended, without evidence, that Maricopa County’s 2020 election was tainted by fraud.

Finchem has backed the state Senate’s discredited review of the election done by the state Senate and is part of a lawsuit trying to block the use of vote-counting machines in state elections. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in August, but an appeal was filed in September.

Finchem has said he only intends to ensure that election laws are followed to address concerns by many Republicans about how elections are run. Still, he tried to get the Legislature to overturn the 2020 election results and has spoken about making major changes to election rules that are written by the secretary.

During the election campaign, Finchem’s challenger, Democrat Adrian Fontes, ran ads saying election deniers like Finchem were making a full-fledged attack on democracy.

Attorney General

There are two major candidates for Attorney General: Republican Abe Hamadeh and Democrat Kris Mayes.

The incumbent Attorney General, Mark Brnovich, ran for the Republican nomination for Senate, but ultimately lost to Blake Masters. In any case, Brnovich is prohibited by term limits from running again as Attorney General.

Hamadeh, a former Maricopa County prosecutor and intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, is endorsed by former President Donald Trump for the Nov. 8 contest.

Hamadeh has said the 2020 presidential vote was rigged against Trump, and experts have expressed worries over what he, along with Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake could do if they were elected the offices they are running for.

During the course of the campaign, Hamadeh has also promised to uphold Arizona’s pre-statehood law that places an almost total ban on abortion.

Meanwhile, Mayes, an attorney and university professor who served for seven years on the Arizona Corporation Commission. She has said that she supports abortion rights, and does not consider either of Arizona’s two abortion laws to be constitutional.

Currently, Arizona has two conflicting abortion laws: one that bans abortions after 15 weeks, and a pre-statehood law that bans nearly all forms of abortion. In October, a judge put the law that bans nearly all forms of abortion on hold.

State Treasurer

There are two major candidates for State Treasurer: Incumbent Kimberly Yee, who is running as a Republican, and Democratic State Sen. Martín Quezada.

Yee has been projected to win the race, according to the Associated Press.

The incumbent, Yee, is the first Asian American woman elected to serve in the Arizona Legislature. She was also the second woman to serve as Senate Majority Leader since U.S. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor served the position in the Arizona Senate in 1973.

Quezada, meanwhile, describes himself on his State Legislature website as a native of Phoenix who spent his early years in Maryvale. He was appointed to the Arizona State Legislature in 2012 to fill a vacant seat.