The Maricopa County Superior Court ruled last week in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Fontes that sections of Arizona’s 2023 Elections Procedures Manual (EPM) are unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable.
The Arizona Secretary of State is permitted under state law to create an EPM, which gives election officials across the state direction compatible with the law and statutes, every odd year before a general election.
In February, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) filed a lawsuit against Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (pictured above), accusing him of making illegal changes to the state’s 2023 EPM, as previously reported by The Arizona Sun Times.
The nonprofit group argued in its 16-page complaint that Fontes’ revisions to the EPM “improperly places protected political speech at risk of criminal prosecution and has an unconstitutional chilling effect on protected political speech.”
On August 6, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jennifer Ryan-Touhill ruled in favor of the AFEC, finding that the 2023 EPM contains “speech restrictions in violation of our Arizona Constitution, misstates or modifies our statutes, and fails to identify any distinction between guidance and legal mandates.”
Judge Ryan-Touhill, who highlighted 13 instances of “problematic language” within the 2023 EPM in her 34-page ruling, said Fontes’ changes to the manual on speech were “vague” and “overbroad,” making portions of the EPM unenforceable:
The judge wrote:
[M]any of the prohibitions listed in the EPM are free speech and protected by both the Arizona Constitution and the U.S. Constitution. What, for example, constitutes a person communicating about voter fraud in a harassing manner? Or, for that matter, “posting” a sign in an intimidating manner? How does a person either do this behavior—whatever it means—or avoid it? And what content printed on a t-shirt might be offensive or harassing to one and not another? What if the t-shirt says, “I have a bomb and I intend to vote!”? Where does the Secretary draw the line?
AFEC’s President Scot Mussi applauded Judge Ryan-Touhill’s ruling in a statement, saying, “The judge correctly realized that certain portions of Secretary Fontes’ illegal and radical manual were nothing more than a brazen attempt to destroy the integrity and transparency of state elections.”
“Secretary Fontes and his team of leftwing ideologues must conform the entire manual to state law as is their statutory duty,” Mussi added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Arizona A.G. Adrian Fontes” by Gage Skidmore CC2.0.
