Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (left) and Alexander Kolodin debate in the Arizona Clean Elections Secretary of State on Sept. 30, 2026. (Photo by Megan Mendoza/The Arizona Republic/pool)
Fontes and Kolodin clash over mail voting and election results as debate devolves into name-calling
In a heated debate full of name-calling and personal barbs, Republican Alexander Kolodin promised Arizonans that, as the state’s top election official, he would deliver election-night results — something that Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said was impossible.
During the hour-long Arizona Citizens Clean Elections debate, Kolodin, a state representative member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus and elections lawyer who has been sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court, worked to distance himself from…
Emergency vehicles at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville on Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. The execution of death row inmate Christa Pike was halted nearly two hours after the state of Tennessee began the lethal injection protocol. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)
How a Tennessee execution gone wrong connects to Arizona’s capital punishment troubles
Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row prisoner who survived an attempted execution by lethal injection Wednesday night, was still in critical condition as of Thursday afternoon. Hers was the second botched execution in the Volunteer State this year.
And there’s a direct line between those executions and problems Arizona had carrying out death sentences in 2022: The same prison official was responsible for overseeing all of them…
Jay Feely at a Turning Point USA event featuring Donald Trump in Phoenix in April 2026. (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Jay Feely called Social Security a ‘Ponzi scheme.’ In CD1, 175,000 people rely on it.
In the hotly contested Congressional District 1, roughly 175,000 people receive Social Security, a program whose fate could be decided by whoever wins control of Congress. Jay Feely, the Republican on the ballot this year, has called the program a “liability” and called it a “Ponzi scheme.”
That could matter immensely with voters: Recent polling shows that voters in other battleground states this year are eager for a solution that avoids automatic cuts to Social Security benefits…
ICYMI
Thanks for reading the Weekender. Did you know our daily morning newsletter is also free? Sign up here. And if you enjoyed today’s edition, please forward to a friend. Increasing our readership helps us cover more news.