A Republican secretary of state candidate in Arizona who claimed last month he goes to the polls in person to vote has a roughly 14-year history of voting mostly by mail, according to Arizona journalist Dillon Rosenblatt.
Mark Finchem, a Donald Trump-endorsed conspiracy theorist, said at a debate last month that he does “not care for mail-in voting” and it’s why he “goes to the polls.”
His voting record, however, reportedly doesn’t speak to his level of not caring for mail-in voting.
Finchem, who attended Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally and who has spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election, voted early by mail in “every single election” since the 2004 general election except for a Tucson city election in 2007, according to public records disclosed in Rosenblatt’s Fourth Estate 48 Substack.
The candidate has voted by mail in 28 of 30 elections through the 2022 primary, according to the Fourth Estate 48.
Rosenblatt also reported that Finchem filled out a Permanent Early Voting List form in 2008, which remained in effect through the start of April.
He voted in person at the polls in the primary election this year, a Pima County voter registration specialist told Rosenblatt.
You can see more of Finchem’s voter file, obtained by Rosenblatt, here.
Finchem attempted to squeeze himself out of the apparent contradiction in an interview with Arizona’s KTAR-FM on Thursday.
“What I said is, I don’t like voting by mail, and I haven’t for the last election,” Finchem said.
“Now before that, yeah, I did vote by mail, but that’s before I realized that it’s not secure.”
Finchem also told the radio station he didn’t want “to do away” with early voting, however, previous tweets show him calling for Arizona to “get rid of” the process.
“The only way you stop that is we have to perhaps adjust the mail-in system,” Finchem told KTAR-FM on Thursday. “Now, I think to say that I’m against mail-in voting, that’s a misrepresentation of what I’ve said.”
Former President Donald Trump threw his support behind Finchem, a self-described member of the far-right Oath Keepers group, when he offered an endorsement to the candidate in 2021.
Trump praised Finchem in a statement for his “incredibly powerful stance on the Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam” and said the candidate “was willing to say what few others had the courage to say,” in apparent reference to the election, The Arizona Republic reported.
Finchem is set to face Democratic candidate Adrian Fontes in the November general election to replace the current Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs.