Mark Finchem's voter file shows he votes by mail
Mark Finchem's voter file shows he votes by mail
During his Arizona PBS debate for Secretary of State, the Republican nominee Mark Finchem said he always goes to the polls to vote. He lied.
Up until this year, Mark Finchem, the conspiracy theorist, stop the steal, election denying Republican candidate for Arizona Secretary of State automatically received his ballot via the mail since he was a Libertarian in 2008.
Despite that, Finchem has been a strong advocate of ending no-excuse mail-in voting for all Arizonans which has been in place for decades and used by at least 80% of the electorate. Finchem during his debate against Democratic challenger Adrian Fontes, the former Maricopa County recorder, last month claimed he always votes at the polls. This is a lie.
“I don’t care for mail-in voting. That’s why I go to the polls,” Finchem said, which you can watch below in a clip from the September 22 debate.
Of course, I was already waiting on a records request I sent to the Pima County Recorder’s Office (Finchem’s home county) to see what his voter file looked like to prove what many have already speculated. Finchem votes by mail almost 100% of the time.
Here’s the slip Finchem filled out in 2008 (date on the left side) to put himself onto the Permanent Early Voting List1, where he remained until April 1, 2022. He also changed his name from Mark William Finchem to Mark W Finchem.
The Pima County Recorder’s Office records for Finchem only went through April, but they told me he did vote at the polls for the August primary where he won in a four-person (but really two-person) race to be the GOP nominee for secretary of state, which oversees the state’s elections and sets the Elections Procedures Manual.
“Mr. Finchem did vote in the 2022 primary election. At the polls (vote center) on election day,” a Pima County voter registration specialist said.
Until the 2022 primary election, Finchem voted early and by mail in every single election since the 2004 general except for the 2007 City of Tucson general election. That’s 28 of 30 total elections (including this year’s).
Finchem changed his registration from Libertarian to Republican on June 19, 2009 and did not alter his registration status again until this year.
See Finchem’s entire voter file here, which also includes the early ballot request forms.
I also requested Adrian Fontes’ voter file. There isn’t a lot that’s interesting there except he registered as a Republican when he first registered to vote in 1996. He switched to independent in 1997 and eventually became a Democrat in 2002. He also skipped out on the 1996 primary election, the 1998 primary election and the 1998 general election, but voted in the 1996 general (the last time before 2020 Arizona chose a Democrat for president) and every other election on file.
A 2021 bill removed the “permanent” status and changed the name to the Active Early Voting List *this has been corrected after calling it “automatic.”
The A in AEVL stands for “Active,” not “Automatic.”