Watch: Arizona Secretary of State candidates Fontes, Finchem face off in debate
Sep 22, 2022, 4:00 PM
PHOENIX — The public’s only scheduled chance to see the two Arizona candidates for secretary of state side-by-side will happen Thursday evening.
A 30-minute debate between Democrat Adrian Fontes and Republican Mark Finchem is sponsored by the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission.
The debate will be broadcast at 5 p.m. on Arizona PBS and moderated by longtime Arizona Horizon host Ted Simons, who has handled Clean Elections debates for more than a decade.
The secretary acts as Arizona’s top election official, oversees many business filings and is next in line if the governor leaves office prematurely.
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Fontes is an attorney and former Marine who ran primary ads saying he would protect voting rights for all Arizonans and that election deniers like Finchem were making a full-fledged attack on democracy.
Finchem insists the courts and the media are ignoring legitimate concerns about problems with the 2020 election. He’s a retired Kalamazoo, Michigan, police officer who has been a member of the Arizona House since 2015.
Fontes said Finchem’s statements are detached from reality and that makes it difficult “to have a cogent debate.”
Finchem was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and has been subpoenaed by the Department of Justice as it investigates the insurrection.
He’s joined a lawsuit with the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, that seeks to require all ballots to be hand-counted in a state that saw 3.4 million ballots cast in 2020 covering more than 100 races. A federal judge dismissed the case in August but they have appealed.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
