A nefarious Democrat election plot just received a major boost.
The courts bailed out the left again.
And that’s because one Supreme Court ruling is about to unleash hell in November.
What Fontes Put on the Ballot — and What He Left Out
Proposition 144, formally titled the “Fast Accurate Secure Transparent Election Results Act,” is a sweeping election integrity constitutional amendment that the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature passed along party lines during the final night of the annual legislative session in June.
State Representative Alexander Kolodin, a Scottsdale Republican, wrote the measure. It requires all voters — including those who cast ballots by mail — to show government-issued identification, prohibits foreign nationals from spending money to influence state elections, bakes into the state constitution the principle that only citizens may register and vote in Arizona elections, and enshrines the legislature’s authority to enact laws governing how elections are run.
That last part is where Secretary of State Adrian Fontes comes in. Fontes crafted the official 50-word descriptive title that will appear on every November ballot. His description reads: “Requires all voters, including voters who vote by mail, to show government-issued ID to vote in each election; makes other changes to election administration and campaign finance prohibitions.”
No mention of citizenship. No mention of the constitutional language declaring that “only citizens may register and vote in Arizona elections” and that elections “shall be decided solely by the votes of eligible citizen voters.” Fontes used roughly 28 of the 50 available words — and still managed to leave those provisions out entirely.
America First Legal, the law firm co-founded by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, filed suit on behalf of three Arizona voters who support Proposition 144, arguing that Fontes illegally omitted the measure’s most important provisions and inserted misleading commentary in their place.
“Free and fair elections start with an honest ballot,” said James Rogers, Senior Counsel at America First Legal. “Secretary Fontes had one job here: tell Arizona voters the truth about what’s on their ballot.”
Rogers also pointed out that Fontes’ description of the foreign-spending provision characterized it as “similar to prohibitions that already exist in federal law” — language that does not appear in Proposition 144 and that, critics say, inaccurately suggests federal law already covers what the measure would establish. Federal law does not prohibit foreign money from being spent to influence ballot measures, and Proposition 144 would close that gap.
The Court’s Reasoning — and the Dissent That Cuts Through It
Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer wrote for the majority, ruling first that the three voters who brought the suit lacked standing to challenge the ballot description.
“These characteristics are shared with many voters across the state during a busy election season and certainly do not constitute a distinct and palpable injury,” Timmer wrote.
But the majority went further, saying it would have ruled against America First Legal on the merits regardless. “The majority agrees with the trial court that the description is not false or clearly misleading,” Timmer wrote. The court reasoned that state law gives Fontes authority to write ballot descriptions with approval from the Attorney General’s Office, and that choosing which provisions to highlight in a 50-word limit necessarily requires the Secretary to make judgment calls.
“A measure like Prop. 144 contains several substantive provisions competing for a fifty-word title; determining which are sufficiently ‘important,’ ‘consequential,’ or ‘primary’ to warrant inclusion … necessarily requires the Secretary to weigh and rank provisions against one another,” Timmer wrote.
Justices William Montgomery and Kathryn King disagreed. The dissenting justices found that the citizenship requirements were “principal provisions” of the ballot referral and should have been included in the description. They also found that the three plaintiff voters had a sufficient beneficial interest to bring the challenge in the first place.
The dissent matters. When two members of the state’s highest court conclude that the citizenship language was central enough to the measure that leaving it out crosses a legal line, that is not a minor quibble over word choice. That is a substantive disagreement about whether Arizona voters are being given an honest picture of what they are voting on.
Fontes is also running for reelection in November — in the same election where Proposition 144 will appear on the ballot. His opponent in that race is Alexander Kolodin, the same state representative who wrote Proposition 144. Fontes publicly opposed the measure, supported a competing ballot initiative that failed to qualify for the ballot, and then wrote the official description that voters will see. That conflict of interest was central to America First Legal’s complaint.
What This Ruling Actually Means for Arizona Voters
Roughly 80 percent of Arizona voters cast their ballots by mail in any given election. The voter ID requirement for mail ballots is one of the most consequential changes Proposition 144 would make to state law — and it is the one provision Fontes chose to emphasize. The citizenship language, which would constitutionally enshrine what is already technically illegal but has never been locked into the state’s foundational document, got cut.
Assistant Attorney General Kara Karlson argued on Fontes’ behalf that the citizenship requirement is not a key provision because citizenship has already been a prerequisite to vote in Arizona. “The most consequential provisions of this measure for voters are the new vote by mail and ID requirements,” Karlson wrote.
That argument has a certain circular quality. The reason the citizenship language matters — the reason the Legislature put it in the measure and the reason America First Legal went to court over it — is precisely that constitutionalizing an existing legal requirement is different from leaving it as ordinary statute. A constitutional provision is harder to challenge, harder to erode, and harder for future courts or legislatures to quietly walk back.
Arizona voters in 2004 approved a state law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and banning non-citizen voting. But voter-approved laws carry different constitutional protections than legislative acts, and locking the citizenship requirement into the state constitution through Proposition 144 would raise the bar further still.
The court’s ruling does not mean Fontes’ description was accurate in any full sense. It means the description was not false or clearly misleading by the legal standard the majority applied. Those are two very different things. A description can be technically defensible and still leave voters without the full picture — and that is exactly what America First Legal argued from the start.
Arizona Republican Party Chairman Sergio Arellano put it plainly when the lawsuit was first filed. “Unfortunately, we have to deal with chaos created by Secretary Fontes every election because he is incapable of being honest with voters,” Arellano said. “Arizonans, including a majority of Fontes’ own party members, want only U.S. citizens to vote in our elections. You would think he would respect their wishes, but he won’t do his job properly. He is not just an ideologue, he is a chaos agent.”
The ballot printing deadline was August 20. The court ruled in time to allow Fontes’ description to go forward unchanged.
And Arizona voters will now head to the polls in November to decide a measure whose ballot description was written by the man running against the measure’s author — a man who had every political incentive to downplay the provisions most likely to drive turnout among election integrity supporters.
Proposition 144 is still on the ballot. Voters can still read the full text of the measure. But most voters read the ballot description, not the full statutory language. That is why the description matters. That is why America First Legal went to court. And that is why the two dissenting justices thought the majority got it wrong.
The election integrity fight in Arizona did not end with this ruling. It just moved to November.
Sources: KJZZ, America First Legal press release, Arizona Daily Independent, Arizona Mirror