Letters: Fontes should be footing the bill for ballots
Posted
By Lyle Tuttle
It’s your money. Just in case you have not been keeping up with the events within the Secretary of State, the Recorder’s Office, the county supervisors and the Attorney General’s office, let me briefly review what has happened:
Announcing that due to [COVID-19], County Recorder [Adrian] Fontes (a Democrat) decided he would have printed and mail out about 200,000 early ballots to Democratic voters who were not on the permanent early voters list.
Secretary of State [Katie] Hobbs (a Democrat) and the county supervisors (Republican majority) advised Fontes that he had no authority to do so, but he went ahead and had them printed anyway. Attorney General [Mark] Brnovich (Republican) files a lawsuit and the Arizona County Superior Court ruled that the ballots could not be mailed.
The cost to print the ballots was $204,000, and now the secretary of state and our county supervisors must decide who should pay for that printing. Interestingly enough, because the ballots were not mailed, the Attorney General’s office says that no laws were broken.
I say give the bill to Fontes, after all, he was told by both the secretary of state and the county supervisors not to print and mail those ballots.
Unfortunately, it looks like the tax payers of Maricopa County will pay for the bull-headedness of our county recorder.
