Arizona’s New Election Chief Warns ‘MAGA Republicans’ Risk Handing a House Seat and Other Offices To Dems Over ‘Nonsensical Big Lie’

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes spoke to Arizona’s secretary of state-elect on Tuesday to discuss the two Arizona counties that are delaying the certification of their midterm election results.

Hayes introduced the interview with a lengthy look at the election conspiracy theories being spun by failed GOP nominee for governor, Kari Lake, and her allies in the media like Steve Bannon – who has called on GOP-led counties in the state to not certify their results.

Hayes began the interview by introducing “the man who’ll be in charge of Arizona’s elections. Adrian Fontes was just elected secretary of state of Arizona after feeding his opponent, Trump-backed election denier Mark Finchem.”

“Secretary-elect let me just first say congratulations on your victory. How do you think this election as a person will be entrusted with the authority to run elections in the state very soon? How do you think this election went?” Hayes asked Fontes.

“I think it went well. I think there were some bumps and bruises here and there. That’s what happens with human endeavors. And no election is perfect,” Fontes replied, referencing tabulator machine errors in Maricopa County, which slowed the count of the vote.

“And real election administrators understand this. But when you’re dealing not reality and fantasy and conspiracy theories, every little possible inconvenience becomes sort of this epic voter suppression, which is just nonsense,” Fontes continued, adding:

And, you know that those flag-waving crowds that you saw in the video just a minute ago were outside of my office at Maricopa County. We got past them then and we’re going to get past them now. Notice the crowds are a lot smaller this time around.

“Yeah, I don’t want to oversell how much momentum is behind this. This seems like a very a fairly anemic showing thus far, although the most sort of notable examples of this movement is, are in these two counties,” Hayes replied, adding:

The county boards do not have the legal right to enter to either change the results provided by the election officials or refuse to certify them. As reporting the Associated Press today, state election director Corey Warrick wrote that if the certification is not received by the Secretary of State by December 5th, then all the county votes will go uncounted. So is it is that your understanding of how the law just mechanically works here with these dissenting counties?

“Yeah. Unfortunately, that disenfranchisement is going to come from those folks. And look, that’ll hand a couple of these statewide offices very handily to Democrats,” replied Fontes, adding:

They could lose enough votes to lose a seat in Congress back to the Democrats if those voters votes don’t get counted. I mean, these folks are playing with fire here and it’s just this nonsensical fantasy that, boy, if their candidate doesn’t win, they’re going to take their ball and go home. That’s not how this works. That’s not how adults operate.

And at some point, these folks are going to wake up, smell the coffee, move on, like Americans have done for, you know, almost two and a half centuries. Look, there’s going to be another election in a couple of years. And if they don’t like the results, they can just try harder next time.

“Just to be clear on this. This is an important point. You’re saying and this is what the elections director seems to indicate in these two rogue counties, that if they if they blow past the statutory deadline, that is an Arizona law for the counties to certify their results, then they just don’t count in the final result, which may redound to the benefit of Democrats and hurt Republican candidates in other offices since these are Republican counties?” followed up Hayes.

“Yeah, that could be really problematic for their own voters. And my question to, you know, these MAGA Republicans is, are you really going to take two of the darkest red counties in Arizona and just throw all those votes away? I mean, you might be handing that southeastern Arizona congressional district to Kirsten Engle, who came up a little bit short,” Fontes replied.

“You might be handing the superintendent of public education race to Kathy Hoffman, the current officeholder who was defeated by a Republican, Tom Horne. This is dangerous territory that they’re playing with. And again, it’s all based on this nonsensical big lie and it’s absolute trash. These folks have a statutory duty to protect the voters, to protect the vote that these people cast. This is the epitome of consent of the governance being thrown out because of petulance. And it all comes from the big lie. It’s got to stop,” he concluded.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC