AZ Political Podcast: Alex Kolodin sidesteps questions mail-in voting, election fraud claims

During the AZ Political Podcast, Alex Kolodin, the Republican nominee for Arizona Secretary of State, doubled down on the most contentious claim made in his debate with Democratic incumbent Adrain Fontes: that Fontes was a “lawyer for the Sinaloa drug cartel.”

Here are the facts: In 2011, Fontes represented Manuel Celis-Acosta as a defense attorney after Celis-Acosta was accused of selling firearms to Mexican drug cartels — one of the cases that stemmed from Operation Fast and Furious, a botched federal law enforcement action attempting to follow straw gun purchases into Mexico.

While Celis-Acosta certainly did business with cartel associates, he wasn’t considered a cartel member by the ATF, the DEA or federal prosecutors.

But I digress — because Arizona’s Secretary of State doesn’t focus on cartels or gun purchases — but it certainly does a lot with elections. And in that regard, Kolodin and I talked a lot about that topic, especially early and mail-in voting.

Problem is, I never found out how he really feels about mailing in your ballot.

He told me he wants to replace signature verification of mail-in ballots with an “objective standard” because the current process is “bordering on a constitutional issue” — viewing it as a disadvantage to voters whose signatures change over time.

Instead, Kolodin would like to see residents issued an early-voter ID number — specifically for early voters.

I don’t know if his desire to reform mail-in voting is a sign that he’s in favor of keeping it, but he didn’t answer me directly about whether he’d like to see mail-in voting eliminated, as President Trump has said he wants.

Instead, he mentioned a law (he takes credit for) that let early voters returning their ballots in person show ID in order to bypass the signature verification process. Something he credits for faster primary results.

He also wouldn’t say whether he believed the 2020 election fraud claims he presented in court as an election attorney. Claims that got him in trouble with the State Bar and the state Supreme Court.

When I read the lawsuit’s claim that Democrat Katie Hobbs (who was secretary of state at the time) and Republican Doug Ducey (Arizona’s governor in 2020) “engaged in massive election fraud for the purpose of… manipulating the vote count to manufacture an election of Joe Biden”, Kolodin claimed “that’s not what we said.”

When I simplified my question to, “OK, but did you believe that?” He said again, “That’s not what we said. What we wanted to do is make sure that every lawful Arizonan had their vote counted.”

When it comes to counting, I hope you feel like you can count on me to ask the questions. I just wish you could also count on me to guarantee you an answer. But that one is out of my control.

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