Arizona Supreme Court Issues Rebuke Against Maricopa County Recorder Fontes

In one of the most scathing rebukes of a public official in years, the Arizona Supreme Court released an opinion Wednesday that said Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes “acted unlawfully” when he issued an instruction to voters that was at odds with the state’s official elections manual.

“Election laws play an important role in protecting the integrity of the electoral process,” Justice Andrew Gould wrote in the opinion. “But when public officials, in the middle of an election, change the law based on their own perceptions of what they think it should be, they undermine public confidence in our democratic system and destroy the integrity of the electoral process.”