Fontes and Republicans spar over E-Qual outage, Arizona election funding

Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Republican lawmakers are pointing fingers at each other after an online portal used by candidates trying to qualify for the ballot crashed over the weekend.

Every candidate running for office in Arizona needs to collect a certain number of voter signatures before they can appear on the ballot in an upcoming election.

They can collect those signatures in-person or by using the online E-Qual system.

That system, which faced a cyberattack last summer, went offline on Friday afternoon and wasn’t fully operational again until Sunday.

What happened?

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, E-Qual crashed after Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a new bipartisan law that moved Arizona’s primary elections up to July 21.

“While updating the back end of the E-Qual system, a typo resulted in a temporary system failure this evening,” Fontes posted to social media on Friday.

That error prevented candidates from collecting their signatures online right as that new law also pushed the deadline to turn in those signatures up two weeks to March 23.

The Secretary of State’s IT staff fixed the initial issue within a few hours on Friday but continued receiving reports that some candidates still could not access E-Qual. On Saturday, staff found “several cascading irregularities on the E-Qual site as a result of a downstream error triggered by the primary election date change on Friday,” according to a timeline provided by the office.

In a letter to lawmakers, Fontes said the age of the system makes it vulnerable to issues, and that small errors can snowball into larger problems.

“Specifically, these systems have inadequate error-checking mechanisms and operate with the inherent limitations and insufficient guardrails of systems built in antiquated legacy code,” he wrote.

After the system went back online, Fontes posted a video calling it “really an inconvenience more than a threat,” because the problems did not affect voter data or the equipment that actually tabulates votes.

The blame game

Republicans were quick to blame Fontes, whose office administers the site, for causing the outage.

“Arizonans expect elections to be administered with competence and seriousness, and when preventable failures occur, they demand accountability — not silence, not excuses, and not business as usual,” Arizona Republican Party Chairman Sergio Arellano said in a statement.

But the secretary of state said it is Republican lawmakers who should bear the brunt of the responsibility, arguing they have failed for years to provide adequate funding to replace the antiquated system.

“Some people wanted to politicize this and say, ‘oh, this is a failure,’” Fontes said. “Well, you know what the failure is? The failure is the legislature that has been exploiting this longtime issue that I’ve been trying to get fixed for years, and they’re not funding it.”

Over the past several years, Fontes’ office has asked Hobbs and lawmakers for millions of dollars in new funding to improve the various elections systems it administers, but that money has not materialized.

According to a breakdown provided by his office, the secretary of state has asked for more than $17 million since 2023 that it has not received, including a $3 million request in 2023 to improve cyber security and other election infrastructure and another $3 million request in 2024 to “modernize” election systems.

The Joint Legislative Budget Committee, which is controlled by Republicans, also declined to consider most of Fontes’ request to re-allocate leftover money that had been designated for last year’s special election in Congressional District 7.

He had asked the committee to allow him to use $3.5 million in unspent money for a variety of projects, including $300,000 for election management systems. So far, the committee has approved the use of $650,000 for cybersecurity.

“It’s as if they broke it and they want to blame somebody else for breaking it,” Fontes said. “These are fragile systems. They are very old systems. They’re very outdated systems, and I’ve been trying to get the resources to have my team fix them.”

Republicans argue he’s deflecting blame.

Rep. David Livingston (R-Peoria), the committee’s vice chair, said releasing the $650,000 for cybersecurity was the highest priority and that the primary date change shouldn’t have required further investments.

Gage Skidmore/CC by 2.0

“I think the other information, changing July 21, should just be standard operating procedure, and they shouldn’t need any money to do that,” Livingston said. “And if they can’t handle doing that, they probably shouldn’t be running the SOS at all.”

State officials have known for months that Arizona would have to move its primary date to meet federally imposed deadlines and make sure overseas military members can vote. In fact, lawmakers made a similar change last year to address the same issue.

And Republicans say Fontes should have been more prepared to implement the changes this time around.

“Even with millions in additional funding, voters are still being disenfranchised by his incompetence. Waste of money!,” Rep. Alexander Kolodin (R-Scottsdale) wrote on social media, noting Fontes initially said the system was back online Friday before it continued to experience problems.

Kolodin, who is running for secretary of state, declined to comment when asked about the issue.

“I don’t know what happened this weekend,” he said.

What’s next

The Secretary of State’s Office said the incident was predictable due to the age and fickle nature of E-Qual and other state election systems, saying they are “highly susceptible both to operational breakdown and compromise by a future cyber-attack.”

For instance, the office’s main election management systems are so old, there are few people around qualified to fix glitches and other errors. In fact, they are maintained by a single person who has already retired but remains on staff as “a highly paid contractor,” according to the Secretary of State’s office.

He said funding is needed now to make sure E-Qual and other election systems don’t experience more problems as election season approaches.

“The legacy system is designed in such a way that small errors or code changes cause cascading repercussions that require manual resolution due to its flawed underlying logic, the error-prone design of the older platform, and the system's outdated and unforgiving architecture,” Fontes wrote in a letter to lawmakers asking them to let him use the rest of the leftover funds from the CD7 election.

Democratic lawmakers pointed out that Republicans have, for years, said that election integrity is a top priority for them.

“I fear it will look as if the Republican chairs of the (Joint Legislative Budget Committee) are intentionally sabotaging the elections for 2026, so please do not do that and schedule this for review immediately,” Senate Minority Leader Priya Sundareshan (D-Tucson) said.

Sen. David Farnsworth (R-Mesa), who chairs the committee in charge of the request, said he “would think it over” after Sundareshan and other Democrats called on him to hold a meeting to consider releasing the remaining $2.9 million from the CD7 election fund.

He was non-committal about supporting larger investments in the state’s election systems.

“We have a lot of needs, and a lot of systems that are out of date,” Farnsworth said. “And it’s a matter of priority.”