Alex Kolodin, a House Representative from Arizona, said that ongoing mismanagement and a lack of focus on quality control have led to a decline in public confidence in the election system. This statement was made during an appearance on the Grand Canyon Times Podcast.
“We have all of these snafus in Arizona’s elections that we’ve had since 2018, probably before,” said Alexander Kolodin, State Representative from Arizona. “The satisfaction with the election system continues to decrease. The secretary is distracted by trying to make the law and not doing quality control and customer service. Which is what the secretary actually ought to be focusing on.”
Arizona’s election administration has faced several management issues in recent years, including staff turnover, understaffed counties, and power struggles. According to AP News, these challenges include the 2024 lawsuit between Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap and the county board over control of elections and funding. These issues have prompted new oversight reforms and independent legislative reviews aimed at improving accountability.
A poll conducted in 2022 by the Secure Democracy Foundation found that 86% of Arizona voters were confident in Election Day voting, and 77% trusted voting machines. As reported by Arizona Mirror, this indicates that basic trust in election procedures remains high even as legislative reforms continue.
According to Governing, Arizona has one of the nation’s highest turnover rates in local election offices. This has led to the launch of a state fellowship program designed to attract and train new election workers. High turnover has been linked to administrative errors and delays, particularly in rural counties.
Kolodin is a Republican attorney representing Arizona’s District 3 since 2023. He holds degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania. He chairs the House Ad Hoc Committee on Election Integrity and has sponsored bills focused on signature verification and chain-of-custody oversight, as reported by an Arizona House press release.
The Arizona House of Representatives is a 60-member lower chamber of the state legislature responsible for overseeing state agencies and crafting laws. This includes election administration oversight through appropriations, hearings, and reform committees led by members like Kolodin, according to information from the official House site.
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FULL, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
Leyla Gulen: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times podcast. I’m your host, Layla Goen. In this episode, we welcome our guest, Alex Kolodin. Alex is the state representative for Arizona’s third district, which includes its most populous, Maricopa County. As an election attorney and member of the House Judiciary Committee, he holds degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Alex is currently running for Arizona Secretary of State with a focus on restoring election integrity and public trust in the process. Alex, welcome. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, election integrity. That has been a topic of discussion that I’ve had with just about every. Interviewee that we’ve had on this program.
Before we dive into that though, how long have you been serving the public of Arizona as an elected official And And what drew you to public service after law school?Â
Alex Kolodin: So I’ve been serving in the State House for [00:01:00] about three years now, and I definitely did not go directly into public service after law school.
I’ve practiced law in the Valley for over a decade. For a lot of that decade they have done election type cases. It used to just be a kind of hobby that lawyers who are political nerds would do on the side up until 2020 when it really became a very hot area of practice. But I’d been doing it since long before then, and I actually tell people when I’m, when I’m on the trail, my first clients in my very first election case.
It was a totally bipartisan group of people spanning the gamut, all the way from progressives to conservative Republicans who were just concerned about the way that elections were being administered in their county. And I think it’s actually a shame that the issue of. Free and fair Elections has become a partisan issue because it shouldn’t be.
If you really think about [00:02:00] what every Arizonan wants from our election system, we want it to be transparent. We want it to be simple, and we want it to be free and fair and lawfully conducted. It’s whether you’re democrat, republican, libertarian, anything. So I ended up running for office frankly because I had seen that a lot of my cases and a lot of the problems that were created in Arizona election law were actually caused by the fact that it didn’t seem to me that the legislature actually knew.
How to write the law or how to read the law. And they kept making mistakes that really caused harmful consequences for Arizonans in terms of both the proper functioning of our election system and public trust in the process. And you do enough cases, you decide, hey, maybe it would be a little bit less work if I went into the legislature and just did the job myself.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. And now you’re [00:03:00] running for Secretary of State, so tell us more about your campaign.Â
Alex Kolodin: So my campaign is based on. Kind of three principles. The first is that Arizonans deserve a Secretary of State who, when you come to him with concerns about the election system, takes you seriously and doesn’t make fun of you.
Our current Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes, seems to think that the voters of the state are robes and that they’re, they’re just silly people. If they don’t have a hundred percent confidence and trust in the government’s administration of the elections, by which. Those same members of the government are elected.
I actually think that’s not true. I think that voters are right to be concerned about our election system ’cause it’s kind of shoddy at this point, and that the Secretary of State is one guy who sits in a tower in Phoenix and can’t possibly see everything on the ground unless he’s actually listening to voters.
That’s the first thing [00:04:00] you know. The second thing is Arizonans deserve a Secretary of State who believes that transparency is the foundation of trust. Adrian Fontes wants you to take your word, his word, that everything’s all right with the system. In fact, my first year in office, he called me up to his office for a meeting, which I thought was kind of bizarre since I’d sued the guys successfully many times during the course of my legal career.
I go, why does he wanna meet with me? Maybe it’s about the election Bill. Who knows? And he shut the door when I came into his office and he just yelled at me for 45 minutes. And the thrust of what he was yelling at me about was, this is, he goes, Alex, you’re the reason that nobody trusts our election system.
And if you were just going to, if you just went and told them that everything is fine, they would believe you because they trust you. And I go, Hey, Mr. Secretary, that’s not how it works. If you want people to have confidence in the system, then you need to stop hiding things from them. And then if they can see, touch, and feel every.
Part of the process. Then if everything’s [00:05:00] fine, they’re gonna know it’s fine. And if there’s problems, wouldn’t you wanna know that? That’s the second reason. And, and the final reason I’m running for Secretary of State is, is just ’cause Arizonans deserve a Secretary of State who will follow the dang law.
I mean, Adrian Fontes has floated the law so many times, and I’ve actually, like I said, I’ve had to sue him many, many times and I’d love to talk with you about that. But at the end of the day, all Arizonans deserve an election process that is conducted according to the rules laid out in statute. Adrian Fontes has shown he’s not gonna do that, but I will.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, and I definitely wanna talk about some of those lawsuits, but why do you think Arizona in particular, has been afflicted with this lack of transparency in the voter process?Â
Alex Kolodin: I dunno if it’s Arizona in particular, but I would say we’re probably one of the worst states for that transparency. And I’ll tell the story this way to Illuminate, right?
So I went to Georgetown, which is a pretty liberal college, and a lot of the people in Georgetown, they end up in [00:06:00] politics. No surprise. So. Before the 2022 election, there is a liberal organization called the Carter Center that they go and they do election monitoring in third world countries. And so the Carter Center thought that they were gonna essentially make fun of maga, right?
They were actually gonna come to Arizona and they were gonna do election monitoring like they do in Sub-Saharan Africa. Well, somebody I had known at Georgetown was working on this project for the Carter Center, and she calls me up before the election to kind of get the lay of the land and, and here’s my view is, is more eyes on the process is better.
And I don’t care whose eyes they are. Like if there’s a liberal organization like the Carter Center that wants to put more eyes on our process, I think that’s wonderful. So I was happy to help her and as we’re having the lay of the land conversation. We were talking about how we could [00:07:00] verify that the, how the Carter Center could verify that the machines were all on the up and up.
And, and, and I asked her, how are you gonna verify that? And she starts laughing at me and she goes, well, Alex, that’s easy. Don’t you have the source code? And I just start laughing at her right back. Right, because, ’cause of course we don’t, right? The source code is, is not made public well forÂ
Leyla Gulen: people who are listening to this.
Can you explain what source code means and how that all comes into play?Â
Alex Kolodin: So, so the source code is essentially the, the code, for lack of a better word, by which the election machines are operating the rules that those machines are following when they’re tabulating votes. I, I, I’m not a technical guy, but that’s the best way that I could explain it.
But the imp, the importance of that was, that was a, a basic transparency. Measure that the Carter Center would expect of any Sub-Saharan African country whose elections [00:08:00] that they were monitoring. But yet it’s something that we’ve withheld from the people of this state. And so what I think has caused this lack of transparency is there’s, there’s.
This feeling among some election officials, not all right, that they’re constantly under siege and that anyone questioning the elections or I is is some sort of rube that’s out to get them. But what there isn’t is any frame of reference for these elections officials as to how elections are administered in other jurisdictions and how much more transparent they are in a lot of other jurisdictions.
So as a consequence of lacking that. Perspective. Some of our elections officials, I think, treat people who are demanding more transparency, overly hostilely, not recognizing that Arizona’s actually an outlier in how secretive and opaque our elections actually are. Mm-hmm.Â
Leyla Gulen: Interesting. That’s really interesting.
[00:09:00] And, and let’s dive into a couple of those lawsuits if we could. You had alluded to those earlier. I’m, I’m curious, you said you fought and won successfully when faced with Adrian Fontes and what he was doing with his office. So tell us a bit more about that.Â
Alex Kolodin: Yeah, it, before the 2020 election. I started getting text messages from members of the grassroots.
Remember, I’ve been doing election law for about a decade at this point, so I’d essentially become the help desk for a large percentage of the state. When something was wrong, I get texts from all the state, Hey, Alex, is this right? So I started getting my phone blown up with texts from all across Marico County about these instructions that Adrian Fontes was sending to people who are voting by mail at the time he was Maricopa County Recorder, and the instructions said.
If you make a mistake on your ballot, don’t worry. You can cross it out and send it back and we’ll take care of it. Which I, I guess if you don’t know anything about elections administration, you go, oh, that’s [00:10:00] such a nice, helpful, convenient thing to do for the voters. But in point of fact, what that does is it, it sends your ballot into a different process where then Adrian Fontes is handpicked.
People get to decide who you intended to vote for, which is scary. So we ended up suing him. The trial court judge said, well, Mr. Codon looks like you’re right. Mr. Fontes is breaking the law, but it’s too close to an election, which they always say, it’s always too close to an election, right? So we can’t do anything about it.
We said, no problem. We took him up to the Arizona Supreme Court and we whooped his butt and, and got that. That instruction corrected. But more importantly than that, and this is what I’m really proud of from that case, is that for the first time in Arizona history, the Arizona Supreme Court said that every Arizona voter has the right to challenge an unlawful act by an elections official, which I think is gonna be great.
And it has been great for keeping our elections officials at least somewhat more [00:11:00] accountable than they were. And I always go, look, I’m gonna do a good job as Secretary of State, but if I screw up, please feel free to sue me because I’ve given you the case you can use to sue me. Yeah. Uh, so that, that, that was one of them.
The, the other, there’s two others, right, right. Before the 2024 General, ’cause if you’re from Maricopa County, they pay you $24,000 to serve in the house. Can’t hardly live on it. I gotta keep my day job, so I su Yeah. Can’tÂ
Leyla Gulen: live on that anywhere really? These days.Â
Alex Kolodin: Yeah. You, you can’t. Yeah. So, so I sued him on behalf of a group called Citizen Ag that had asked for records of his compliance with what’s called the NVRA.
NVRA is the National Voter Registrations Act. And to, to sort of simplify matters. It says the, the Secretary of State has to make sure that the state maintains clean and accurate voter roll. So they were asking, well, show us, show us what you’ve done to make sure Arizona maintains clean and accurate voter roll.
Mm-hmm. And he wrote back to them [00:12:00] and he said. I don’t have any records that’s showing that I’ve been doing my job. Essentially, he said, I don’t have any records. So we, we take him to court and, and the federal judge, when we draw the judge, ’cause the judge is kind of randomly selected. The federal judge we draw, I think is a either Clinton or Obama appointee.
And I’m look at, oh shit, we gotta, we got a bad immediate bias. We, we, we, we got a bad truck. So, but I walk into court. And the judge goes to the ags office that he, he starts going, why isn’t Secretary Fontes here? Doesn’t he have any respect for the court? And how can he say he doesn’t have any records? And come to find out, he had been a federal prosecutor at the time that Adrian Fontes was on the defense panel and apparently knew something of of Secretary Fontes character.
I actually went and ordered the transcript. It was so good. And during that argument we said, look, judge, if he really doesn’t have any records of cleaning up the [00:13:00] voter rolls, then you’ve gotta order 1.1 million people to be purged from the roles before the election. ’cause that’s how many people. Invalid registrants, there would be, well, sure enough, the, the Attorney general’s office goes, well, actually, we might have some records.
And, and when they produced them, I mean, it turns out he really hasn’t been doing his job. I don’t know what he has been doing. I mean, he’s, he’s certainly been. Been doing a lot of trolling of, of President Trump, but he doesn’t actually seem to be taking the actual job seriously. ’cause there’s still a huge gap between what’s been reported to the Federal Elections Assistance Commission and, and the registrants that are actually on Arizona’s rule.
So there’s still a huge number of registrants that shouldn’t be there. Actually, Maricopa County Recorder, Justin Heap just removed thousands more registrants and that makes it since he’s been in office, that he’s removed hundreds of thousands of registrants from the role. So what’s been going on, whose hand has been at [00:14:00] on the till, if we have hundreds of thousands of invalid registrants in Maricopa County.
And then finally, the Secretary of State gets to. Gets to put out something called the Elections Procedures Manual because some idiot in the legislature decades ago decided that the Secretary of State should actually get to write substantial criminal elections law, which is scary. Not one guy should not be making criminal law.
That should be for the legislature, but he gets to do it, and when he gets into office, he decides to use this, this little inch that the legislature gave him. To try to rewrite our entire elections code and to do really scary things like he tried to make it a crime to criticize elections officials or to have a MAGA rally down Central Avenue if there was a polling place on Central Avenue.
And I, I sat down with our general counsel in the house who, back when she was at Benoit’s office, I’d actually done election cases with, and I, we go kinda let him get away with [00:15:00] this. We come up with a statewide litigation strategy to take on this manual. I actually got one of the cases started myself to, to take on the First Amendment violations before we found a conservative organization to take it over.
And the upshot of it was that we won three different cases against Adrian Fontes about this manual right before the 2024 general election. Ultimately resulting in the entire manual, getting ruled in valid and thrown out. So we protected the voting rights of Arizonans. But what he was trying to do was he was trying to scare conservative voters away from the polls with threats of having them arrested and hauled out.
I mean, this is who this guy is as, as the chief elections official of the state. It’s your job to protect people’s rights, to criticize you and even vote you out of office. And he’s doing exactly the opposite, and that’s why he needs to go.Â
Leyla Gulen: Oh wow. Wow. That’s a lot. Yeah. Well, you, you’ve certainly been, been doing a lot [00:16:00] in an effort to speak on behalf of, and act on behalf of the voters.
And I’m just curious if you were to, if a, if a caveman were to come down and, and establish himself here in the United States, and we’re talking about election, lack of integrity with our elections, does it skew in one direction over the other? Because to your point earlier. When we started this podcast episode, you were saying that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
So if you don’t have integrity in our elections, it could benefit one party versus the other, and vice versa, so, so would you say though today that a lack of integrity is skewed towards one party over the other?Â
Alex Kolodin: So that’s a really important question, and I’m glad that you asked it. I, I, I tend to think that a lack of integrity in our elections benefits, entrenched interests in our politics, but not one party over the [00:17:00] other, over the, the historical term.
In any given cycle, it could benefit one party or the other, but it, what it really benefits are those entrenched interests. It, it was the case back when I started. My legal career that the people who were most concerned with election integrity were actually the progressives. And if you, you actually look at the stuff that Adrian Fontes put out, maybe five, 10, probably 10 years ago, it sounded very mad in terms of his policy prescriptions.
Of course, he’s now, now shied away from that. But the progressives used to be the ones pushing for greater transparency and accountability in our elections. And why? Because they were. Getting screwed by establishment Democrats. That’s what was happening. Uh, and, and the funny thing was, I, I, I can’t overstate the degree to which a lot of the people who think that the election integrity movement or there’s all a bunch of rubes, right, have just never [00:18:00] heard a, a cogents argument for why our election system is so broken and how it’s so broken and why it needs to be fixed.
Uh, and, and I. I’ll give you the example of when I came into the legislature. Okay? And look. I’m a practical guy. I’m like, he hives up on the ninth floor. Okay? I’m gonna have to work with the Democrat, okay? If I wanna actually fix the elections or not fix all of them, obviously, but like fix part of the problem with our elections, I’m gonna have to work with the Democrats, okay?
Like I’m a realist, okay? So I go around my first week. To a couple of Democrat colleagues, Hey, can we work on this election reform together? Can we work on that election reform together? What can we do together? Right. And and I actually had one of them tell me that first week, Alex, we’re never gonna work with you.
You’re, you’re like a crazy. MAGA election, denying so and so, and I go, okay, whatever. So, [00:19:00] so I we’re sitting on the elections committee week after week, and the Dems on the committee start to realize that the Republicans are actually making a lot of sense and asking a lot of questions to which their guys don’t have good answers.
And as they get too exposed to this, there are Democrats in the legislature who actually get more and more concerned about the state of our elections, actually had one. Democrat member of the legislature come to me, and I’m not gonna out who it is, but like come to me privately and express that she was quite concerned about the, the voting machines and thought that there had probably been prior elections where that tipped the results.
By the way, she didn’t think it was in 2020. She thought it was in 2004 and. Eventually got to the point where, look, they never, they never agreed with us all the way, right? But there were certain Democrats who were at least willing to work together to fix some of the problems with our election system, and that resulted in getting.
One of the most historic achievements in in [00:20:00] Arizona election reform in state’s history passed with my name on it, which I’m very proud of, the, what we call the timeline bill, which which made a lot of common sense reforms to our process. Things like actually establishing legally binding rules for how the identity of early voters is gonna be verified in the signature comparison process and people don’t know, but before the 2024.
General election, there weren’t any rules for how you check to make sure that the voter’s name on the ballot actually belonged to the voter elections official. If they wanted to go consult a psychic medium to figure out if the signatures matched, they could do that. I mean, seriously. ’cause there were no rules.
It just said that the, that the officer in charge of elections had to compare the signatures and be satisfied. There was another reform that we put in place that required that the political parties be given equal access to what’s called the cure data. The cure data is about provisional ballot voters, people who cast a ballot, but we’re [00:21:00] not sure if they’re authorized to cast a ballot or cast a ballot in that jurisdiction.
And if they’re a valid registrant, then if their ballot doesn’t get cured, then, then they’re disenfranchised. But what was happening was we’d have radical folks in elections offices who would slip that data under the table to progressive groups, and then they’d slow play the conservatives resulting in, in voters getting disenfranchised.
So we fixed that. We required that data to be expeditiously sent. To both political parties. People were concerned again about the machines. There are black box in a lot of different ways, and so we required that some of the metadata from the election tabulator machines get posted online within, I think it was 48 hours within the close of, of tabulation, so that voters had that, that peace of mind and, and obviously the machines are still in a lot of ways a black.
Box, but at least it was a step in the right direction. So we did those things and a lot [00:22:00] of other positive reforms. And the way that we got Katie Hobbs to sign the bill ’cause she in no way wanted to sign off on any of this, but Congress had actually screwed something up. When they passed the revised electoral count Act to 2022, and if we hadn’t fixed it at the state level, then what would’ve happened was that all Arizona uniform military overseas voters would’ve been disenfranchised in the, in the primary.
And that Arizona’s Electoral College votes may very well not have been counted in the 2024 General, which Katie Hobbs was terrified of since she thought that Biden was gonna get those votes. So we fixed that too in my bill and, and this just kind of show, kind of showed. Is that like, like election reform can be a.
Nonpartisan issue. Again, if you have the right leadership, but you can’t have a radical activist like Adrian Fontes up there in the Secretary of State’s office trying to rewrite the rules [00:23:00] to benefit his favorite people. You have to have lawful administration of our elections.Â
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. And I think a, I think any voter, any one appreciates transparency.
And you actually answered the, my next couple of questions, just kind of going back to the machines and the tabulation, it, could there ever be an effort to modernize the election system? And when I say modernize it almost to take technology out of the process when possible.Â
Alex Kolodin: Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question.
So, so this is something that’s actually decided at the county level. If you read title 16, which is our elections code in the state, it doesn’t appear anywhere to say that counties have to use voting machines. So if a county wanted to, it’s my belief that, that they could decide not to do that. For a long time in the State’s history, what we had were analog voting machines, right?
So you know [00:24:00] why, you know why people used to pull the lever so that at the end of the day they had a punch card spit out from that machine via a totally mechanical, non-electronic process. I know that, that, that gave the vote totals and we never had any of any of these concerns back when we hadÂ
Leyla Gulen: occasional hanging.
Chad, of course. Well, in Florida they had that.Â
Alex Kolodin: Right, right. But not here. Yeah. But, but, but, but here, people seem generally satisfied with that. But, but my view, my view is this, right? I, I, I respect the separation of powers. I hate that the Secretary of State was given the power to make election law. In the elections procedures manual.
I don’t like that. I, I think that the proper policymaking branch of government is the legislature ’cause it’s closest to the people. And reps can talk about all of the unique issues of their district and how a potential reform would con. Would affect their constituents. The Secretary of State is not supposed to be the [00:25:00] guy who moves the system from one form to another form or anything like that.
What the Secretary of State is supposed to do is make sure that whatever election system that the people and their elected representatives decide on works as well as it possibly can. So if the people want that reform, I’m certainly not gonna stand in the way of it. I’m gonna make sure that if it’s implemented, it works as well as it possibly can.
And if the. People decide to do something else, I’m gonna do the same thing. Make sure that the system works as well as it possibly can.Â
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. And if you were to be elected as Secretary of State, do, would you also suggest that some of those powers be taken away from that office? Because I’m curious.
Because you have support from, from your, your voter base to be viewed as fair and impartial, especially by those who didn’t vote for you. Would you want to make an effort to take away some of those powers that you see, seem to think are, are unjust today?Â
Alex Kolodin: [00:26:00] Yeah, so I’ve actually run a bill to, to get rid of the provision in Title 16 that says that the EPM has the force of law, ’cause only the legislature makes the law.
And I would totally support efforts to do that when I’m in office or to require the legislature approve the elections procedures manual or there’s, there’s any number of variations on the reform, but it, but to my. Way of thinking. Right? The, the fact that the secretary has this power is not only bad from a, from a sort of.
Constitutionalist point of view, but it’s also actually bad for the secretary’s ability to do his job, right? If you think about what is the executive branch actually supposed to do, right? It’s not supposed to make the law. It’s supposed to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Well, if you’re spending a large portion of your time and your staff’s resources trying to make the law, which is an, which is a [00:27:00] really heavy lift.
I mean, that’s why the legislature has a budget of over $10 million a year, I think it is, because they have all this staff, they have all these people working on hammering it out. It’s easy for a single person to make a mistake, which is another reason they ought to do it. Right. You’re, you’re wasting all those time and resources, and that’s time and resources that you’re not spending, making sure that.
The counties are following the law that you’re, that you’re not spending helping counties to more effectively administer their elections. And as a consequence, we have all of these snafus in Arizona’s elections that we’ve had since 2018, probably before, but really. Started coming to prominence of voters’ minds in 2018.
Right. And the satisfaction with the election system, the customer satisfaction, I mean, if we want to think about it that way, continues to decrease because the secretary is distracted by trying to make the law and not doing quality control and customer service, which is what the secretary actually ought to be focusing on.[00:28:00]Â
Leyla Gulen: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Now a journalist, Rachel Alexander, who we’ve just had on this program, as a matter of fact, she’s been very critical of Adrian Fontes. She recently did a profile on you. Can you share with our audience just some of the items that she touched on in that piece?Â
Alex Kolodin: Oh gosh. There’s a, the, the, the, the media spend spell spills a lot of ink on me.
Could you be a little bit more specific?Â
Leyla Gulen: Oh, okay. Certainly. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Well, she did a profile piece on you and, and she also has her criticisms of Adrian Fontes, so I was just curious if there was anything else that stuck out in that article. I mean, if it doesn’t, don’t worry. I also, what I wanted to get to though is.
So you are currently vice chairman of the Regulatory Oversight Committee. You’re a member of Federalism Military Affairs and Elections Judiciary, public Safety and Law Enforcement. Of those three committees, so. I had just like to know, as, as someone with a legal background, how do you balance the protection of, of constitutional [00:29:00] rights with the need for public safety and, and making these policy decisions?
I’m just kinda wanting to switch gears here and, and touch on a few other things before we wrap up.Â
Alex Kolodin: Oh, yeah. Uh, I, I do wanna hit that point, but there’s actually one part of Rachel Alexander’s piece that I think she mentioned in terms of my policy ideas that I, okay, great. No, I had to think about it for a second.
I’m trying to remember the piece is there, but. So, so Arizona’s got a state airplane. Okay. Now, typically, like this has been used to transport the governor to junkets in Vegas or whatever, but it, it seems to me that one of the really valuable things the Secretary of State’s office could do. Is is have a team of people who are cross-trained on different county systems.
’cause we don’t have a centralized election system in the states become more centralized over time, but still a lot of the, the control is left to the counties as to how exactly they wanna administer their elections. So I think if you had a really great troubleshooting team. That was cross-trained. Then if you had a problem in a given county on election day or during the [00:30:00] tabulation process, or even before you could get them out there, right, to immediately solve the problem, send ’em down from the tower, give ’em a DPS escort to the airport, and they could be in Mojave County or, or.
In Yuma County and in, in an hour and, and go and fix the problem. So that’s, that’s one of the things that I definitely like to do, as well as having them out there on the ground way in advance of the election to work through different issues that could come up so that when it’s actually game time, you’re not.
You’re not practicing, you’ve already practiced and you play the game properly. So that’s, that’s, that’s one of those, those are two of the things that she touched on the piece. Now in terms of balancing public safety with, with transparent and secure administration of our elections, I think that the public safety.
Has actually gotten really overblown, right? This is, this is the way that elections officials like Adrian Fontes or like former Maricopa County [00:31:00] recorder, Steven Richer, have tried to fight back against members of the public who are seeking greater transparency. They would go, oh, we can’t release that information because elections officials are getting threats and we can’t, we can’t put them at risk.
And there’s, every year we get the, the, there’s. There’s a certain categories of people that that could have their information redacted from the voter rolls called the address confidentiality program. And every year there’s people added to that list because, oh, these people are afraid of having their information listed on the rolls and those people are afraid, which makes the voter rolls harder to audit.
Yeah. And I kind of look at all of this and go, this is, this stuff is, is just the hallucinations of. Of folks who are either insane or, or they’re acting in bad faith. Yes, I, I, I’m sure elections officials get threats. Look, as a guy who’s been in the [00:32:00] public eye a lot, like I’ve gotten threats, I’ve actually gotten more threats as a.
A practicing lawyer that never got as member of the legislature. I mean, a lot of people don’t know it. Like I actually had somebody try to kill a lawyer in my office when we were defending the Arizona audit. Okay. Like I’m no, I’m no secret to that. I know that there’s crazy people in the world, but at the end of the day.
When you step into public service and being an elections official, whether you’re elected or not, right? Or just staff, right? You, you have stepped into a role of public service. You don’t have to do that, okay? In fact, I would say for a lot of people working in the government, they should go be productive in the private sector, okay?
But if you, you should only be in the government if you have that heart for public service and, and are willing to take risks to serve the public. And that sometimes means that we can’t make you maximally safe, okay? Your job as an elections official is not, [00:33:00] is not to be maximally safe, right? Your job as an elections official is to deliver to the people of Arizona an elections process they can trust and, and here’s the great thing about that.
Right is if we have a more transparent system, elections officials are actually going to be safer, okay? Because you’re not going to have folks thinking that they’re responsible for cooking up some plot, okay? Because if you can really see, touch, and feel every part of the process, right? Then if there isn’t a problem, people are gonna see that there’s not a problem.
Or if there is a problem, right? But. They’re gonna know who’s responsible for it and not think that every elections official is responsible for it. And so it’s like, it’s like one of those things with the First Amendment. Like the First Amendment exists for a lot of reasons, right? But one of the reasons the First Amendment exists is that censorship always backfires.
Um. I’m Jewish and I, I kind of tell my colleagues this when, when [00:34:00] they’re sort of pushing these well-intentioned antisemitism bills, a lot of which are unconstitutional, and I go, I go, look, guys like US Jews, we’ve been, we’ve been the. Primary beneficiaries of the First Amendment. And if you start telling people that they can’t say anti-Semitic stuff, like they’re gonna go, Ooh, why don’t they want us to say that?
Maybe there is something going on with them. It’s like, and, and as a Jew, like, that’s not good for me or my family, right? If, if, if somebody’s gonna be some stupid antisemite, like, then I want them to be able to talk as much as they want and so that everybody can see what an idiot they are, right? And then, and then people are gonna go, well, that person’s.
Idiot, and then they’re not gonna listen to them and they’ll go away. Right? It’s the same thing with transparency in our elections process where it might be counterintuitive that greater transparency will make people safer, but it’s also the truth, and that’s important.Â
Leyla Gulen: Yes, indeed. Well, I just have a couple more [00:35:00] questions for you.
What Arizona is the battleground state? What do you see as the biggest legislative challenge facing Arizona in the next five years and, and how are you preparing to address it? Oof, IÂ
Alex Kolodin: mean. Loaded question. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I mean, look, elections is a meta topic, right? Like elections isn’t actually why we, why we do politics.
We do policy politics to adjudicate disputes over substantive policy elect. The elections process shouldn’t even be a topic for discussion. It should just kinda work. And so people can focus on the. Actual contentious issues. Right? And so we do have to fix our elections and restore public confidence in those elections to really, to really move forward on anything else.
Okay. That being said, okay. In terms of actual substantive policy, that I think is gonna be the greatest challenge, face of the state at the next five years, it’s water. Okay. We, we are in the process of, of [00:36:00] negotiating a new Colorado River use agreement. There are lower flows on the Colorado than at the time that they took the original measurements to allocate out to the states for the Colorado River Compact.
Way back when, I think it was the thirties. Right. And as a consequence, like. We know we’re gonna take a really substantial cutback in terms of our state’s, Colorado River allotment in 2026 or 2027, which is gonna have really bad results, right? It’s gonna, it’s gonna cause a lot of of folks who live in the valley, or in Pinal County or in the Tucson area, it’s gonna really skywalk at their.
There are, there are water rates. There’s gonna be less water for agriculture. There’s gonna be less, less water for the high tech growth and development we’re doing as a state. And that’s gonna be really tough for us. And historically, we, we have not shown great interest in making meaningful reforms to the way that, that we do [00:37:00] water as a state.
And, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. But, but I think the, the saddest. Probably biggest reason is that there’s a lot of folks who really financially benefit from having our water system screwed up. It’s like, why? Why is the election system so screwed up? Because people benefit from that. Why is the water system so screwed up?
’cause there’s a small group of people who benefit from that. Like, like most people don’t know, like. All of the transferable groundwater, I shouldn’t say all. Most of the transferable groundwater in the state is owned by three big hedge funds, one of which is where the French government’s pension fund invests.
And as a consequence, they. They don’t want anymore groundwater to be transferable because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to charge excise prices for it. But the another consequence of that is that we can’t use water as efficiently as a state, which I think is kind of sad. So, so I’m hoping that. Uh, that, [00:38:00] God forbid what I’m saying is correct and, and we really start feeling pain as individuals and families on the waterfront.
I’m hoping the people kind of wake up to this and go, we gotta reform the system. Water is for people and we have to make sure that the system that we have is serving the people and not a few entrenched corporate interests. ’cause honestly, the sort of great. Body of the people is the only thing powerful enough to take on these entrenched interests.
And until the people really feel that need to do that, the the interests and their campaign contributions and their lobbyists, they’re gonna win every time.Â
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Yeah. It’s kinda like the movie Chinatown. It doesn’t only happen in Los Angeles, but it happens in other places in this country as well. Uh, yeah.
Well, very good. And once you enter into an election campaign, you’re in it for the long haul. Can you give our audience any specific dates that they should look out for and how to find more information about you and maybe how to [00:39:00] get in contact with you if they have any questions.Â
Alex Kolodin: Yeah, absolutely. The, the primary and the general, they’re not until next year, we are, we’re busy collecting signatures, which we don’t have to have to turn in for about another three, three quarters, so plenty of time to help us out with that.
If you’d like to sign my nominating petition, you go to www. Alex, four A-Z-A-L-E-X-F-O-R-A z.com. You can make a contribution if you’re financially able and the spirit moves you. ’cause it’s gonna take a lot of money to take on the establishment in Adrian Fontes who spends between him and his, you know, Arabella Advisors network.
Probably spend about $10 million to get him elected in 2022. So definitely need that help. If you’d like to sign my nominating petition, I’m gonna need. Between seven and 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot to take him on. You can do that at www.alexfouraz.com. There’s also links to sign my nominating petition or make a [00:40:00] contribution on my uh, X page.
And that’s at real. Alex Odin, my last name is spelled. K-O-L-O-D-I-N-K as in kilo and you can also follow the progress of our campaign there. So I would love it if, if your listeners are, are willing to help out with any and all of that and I’m definitely look forward to seeing those that I haven’t met on the trail.
Leyla Gulen: Fantastic. Alex k it in. Thank you so much for joining us.Â
Alex Kolodin: Thank you for having us.
