Court won’t force Adrian Fontes to rewrite GOP election measure’s ballot summary

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The America First Legal Foundation was created by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Project 2025 and one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisors.

Prop. 144, also known as the “Fast Accurate Secure Transparent Election Results Act,” was one of five controversial last-minute ballot referrals that the Republicans who control the Arizona Legislature approved along party lines in a marathon night of voting on the last day of the annual legislative session in June. 

The wide-ranging measure would add a series of provisions to the Arizona Constitution that will change how elections are administered in the Grand Canyon State. The most consequential is requiring every voter — including those to cast their ballots by mail — to show government identification. (State law already requires people who vote in person at a polling location to provide identification.) Roughly 80% of Arizona voters in any election vote by mail, but how they would show identification is unknown; Prop. 144 would direct the legislature to figure that out.

It also would  prohibit foreign nationals from spending money to influence state elections — they are already barred from giving to candidates, but can give money to other political committees — and require all polling locations to provide on-site tabulation of ballots for voters who want it. And it creates a new, tougher standard for challenging election laws enacted by the state legislature.

Prop. 144 also contains provisions limiting registering to vote and voting to citizens. Those already exist in state law, and have since Arizona became a state in 1912.

The three supporters of Prop. 144 represented by America First Legal Foundation contended that the provisions declaring that “only citizens may register and vote in Arizona elections,” and that the results of the elections “shall be decided solely by the votes of eligible citizen voters” were the most important parts of the measure.

They argued that Fontes illegally left any mention of the citizenship provisions out of the ballot description, and asked the courts to force him to change that prior to the deadline to finalize ballots on Aug. 20. 

Both the trial and Arizona Supreme Court denied that request. 

“A measure like Prop. 144 contains several substantive provisions competing for a fifty-word title; determining which are sufficiently ‘important,’ ‘consequential,’ or ‘primary’ to warrant inclusion … necessarily requires the Secretary to weigh and rank provisions against one another,” Timmer wrote. 

To have legal standing to bring their challenge to the ballot language describing Prop. 144 to voters, its supporters had to show that they could suffer specific harms, beyond what a typical voter might experience, based on what they described as a “misleading” summary. 

Because the three supporters formally registered their support in the Arizona Legislature’s system for the legislation that placed Prop. 144 on the ballot, the America First Legal Foundation argued that a misleading ballot description would harm them specifically. 

Attorney for the foundation, James Rogers contended that the reportedly inaccurate ballot description would distort what the supporters were actually backing when they signed in official support of Prop. 144. 

But both the trial court and the high court disagreed, with Chief Justice Ann Timmer writing for the majority that the supporters’ official register of their backing of the referral in the legislative system and their intent to advocate for it ahead of the November election did not put them at risk of specific harms needed to give them power to bring the lawsuit. 

“These characteristics are shared with many voters across the state during a busy election season and certainly do not constitute a distinct and palpable injury,” Timmer wrote. “Additionally, Petitioners do not allege any interest that has been or will be injured by the Secretary and Attorney General’s descriptive title. Nothing prevents Petitioners from continuing to advocate publicly for Prop. 144.”

Timmer was joined by Justices John Lopez, James Been and Maria Elena Cruz.

Justices Bill Montgomery and Kathryn King dissented, writing that they would grant the supporters of Prop. 144 standing to bring the lawsuit under a relaxed standard and ordered Fontes to rewrite the description to include references to its citizenship requirements. 

The dissenting justices wrote that because they found that citizenship requirements were “principal provisions” of the ballot referral, they should be included in the ballot description.

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