Geoff Bennett:
Well, late today, a federal district court again rejected the Justice Department’s bid to obtain state voter rolls for what is now the 16th straight time.
Our Liz Landers is back now with a view from those responsible for running our elections.
Liz Landers:
For more on how state election administrators are responding to the president’s speech, I’m joined now by two election officials in key battleground states, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Gabe Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
Gentlemen, thank you for joining “News Hour.”
Adrian Fontes (D), Arizona Secretary of State: Thanks for having us.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia Voting System Implementation Manager:
Happy to be here.
Liz Landers:
Secretary Fontes, I’m going to start with you.
How do you respond to the president’s claim from last night’s speech that nearly 280,000 noncitizens are registered to vote nationwide and the accusations that Democrats do not care about this issue? Do you?
Adrian Fontes:
Well, I care about the issue. I just don’t think that the president has his facts right. And I don’t think he’s telling the entire story.
I think his numbers are wrong. In fact, when we dug a little bit deeper into some of the documentation, we know the numbers are wrong. And we have got better things to do than listen to the president’s grievance from 2020. We have got an election to run.
And I think election administrators across the country understand that they have work to do. We are professionals. We have been running great elections for a very long time. And, interestingly, you never heard the president complaining about what happened in 2024, did you?
And so I think, as to this subject particularly, this particular president lacks credibility to the degree that his comments were really given the weight that they deserve, which is not much.
Liz Landers:
Gabe, the president said that Georgia was one of 18 states whose voter files were compromised by China, 220 million files in total nationwide. Is this new information and should this concern voters?
Gabriel Sterling:
Well, no, not really, because the reality is notice what he said specifically. The first thing he said was, they bought it. They bought it because this is the publicly available information.
And what is the theory of the crime here? What are they going to do with it? This is stuff that anybody can get. They can’t change a vote. They can’t change a tally. They can’t take your vote away. None of that works.
And if you go back to the original March 2021 intelligence assessment, it was already there in large part. And we know they were trying to do this. So this has had no outcome, and everything in the supporting documentation has said nothing has happened anywhere in 2020, 2022, 2024, and now going into 2026.
Liz Landers:
I’m seeing Secretary Fontes nodding his head to what you’re saying right now, Gabe.
Secretary Fontes, you’re a Democrat. Gabe, you’re a Republican. You don’t necessarily agree all the time on political issues, but you seem to be aligned on this. It seems like you both agree that these revelations do not change the results of the 2020 election.
Secretary Fontes, I will let you answer first.
Adrian Fontes:
Well, yes, it doesn’t change the results because our elections are run by professionals who can distinguish between their duty and their opinion.
I think what’s really important here, let’s just go back to that voter data question of the voter rolls. We want certain portions of our voter rolls to be public, like they are public right now, because that way folks who know how these systems work can look at who’s registered to vote, can go to a cast vote record later, and they can verify that only registered voters voted.
That is a safeguard. That is a transparency issue. That is an access question, and it keeps us accountable. We know this, those of us who do this work. So, Gabe and the folks in Georgia, they do a great job. Folks across the country do a great job.
The problem we have is, the lies from the White House are making us look terrible, and that’s problematic for our voters.
Liz Landers:
Gabe, did you hear anything in last night’s speech that makes you rethink what happened in 2020 and the election that was certified in Georgia?
Gabriel Sterling:
Well, of course not.
None of this is a revelation. This is all stuff we have all known as election administrators. And I’m just happy to see that the White House and the federal government is catching up to our election administrators, who have been working for the last 10, 15, 20 years.
We deal with these issues every day. We deal with the fact that people try to register and they shouldn’t be trying to register. We deal with list maintenance. We deal with logic and action testing for our machines. These are constant things that we do. We are always improving. We are always measuring.
And the stuff last night, here’s the real issue. I think a lot of what he said last night was true. But it was cast in such a way to make it seem nefarious and awful. He said, there are all these — they have your data. There are all these noncitizens on the registration list. What he didn’t say was, they voted.
Liz Landers:
Mr. Secretary, you are in the middle of election preparation right now. Arizona has primaries on Tuesday. Does anything you heard last night make you think you need to check or reconsider anything for those elections this coming week?
Adrian Fontes:
Nope. Nothing I heard last night is going to make a hill of beans a difference here in Arizona nor anywhere else in the country, I think.
Gabe said it very well. There’s nothing new here. There’s nothing revelatory here. In fact, I think I told someone recently I was kind of disappointed. I was hoping to hear something new, so that we can make another improvement, so that we can adjust another system to benefit our voters. But there is nothing new here.
And I don’t think that anybody who is reasonable and who understands how to see facts for what they are can give this speech from last night any sort of credibility. We are going to continue to do what we do. We do it well. All of the analysis and checks and audits and the scrutiny we have been under for years has proven that out.
And, by the way, our voters love doing what they do. And, in Arizona, 85 percent of us vote by mail. We’re going to keep doing it whether or not the president of the United States likes it. It’s none of his business what we do in Arizona. He needs — he’s got a lot of other things that he should be thinking about.
Liz Landers:
Gabe, final question for you.
There was mention last night in these speeches and then again today from the homeland security secretary of future investigations into election officials who do not cooperate with DHS or the Department of Justice in turning over some of these voter rolls. What is your response to that? Will you cooperate?
Gabriel Sterling:
And, as a Republican, I don’t want a centralized database of voters, because at some point a Democrats come into presidency, and they can say everybody can vote.
This is about federalism. This is about the Constitution. This is about state control. And as a Republican, I want my team to win elections. Every time the president brings this up, we end up doing worse than elections. Last night, when he mentioned Michigan specifically, I thought that Jocelyn Benson should send him a thank you note for all the money she’s going to raise because he mentioned her state.
And the Republican nominee there just got worse off than he would before. In Georgia, we’re a swing state, and we have a Senate race, a governor’s race that are really tight. And none of our candidates want to be talking about this because it doesn’t help us get swing voters.
It’s just coo coo ca choo crazy town. And it’s just — I wish they would focus on the right things, which is to make sure the states run good elections. And guess what? They already do. 2020 was safe. 2022 was safer. 2024 was safer. And 2026 is going to be safer than those.
Liz Landers:
Gabe Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, Adrian Fontes of Arizona, thank you both so much for your time.
Adrian Fontes:
Happy to be here.
Gabriel Sterling:
Thank you, Liz.
Adrian Fontes:
Good to talk to you, Gabe.
