01-04-2025
Arizona Freedom Caucus member Kolodin running for secretary of state in 2026
Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, on Jan. 13, 2025. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
Republican state Rep. Alexander Kolodin on Monday announced his plans to run for Arizona secretary of state in 2026.
Kolodin, who was first elected to represent Scottsdale in 2022, is an election denier and a member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus.
He's also an attorney who was sanctioned by the State Bar of Arizona in 2023 for taking on lawsuits challenging the 2020 election, including the infamous 'kraken' lawsuit that made implausible and evidence-free claims of massive election fraud.
'I'm Alex Kolodin and I'm running for Secretary of State to restore transparency to our elections once and for all,' Kolodin wrote in a social media post on Monday. 'Arizona elections continue to be a laughing stock under (Democratic Secretary of State Adrian) Fontes. Voter confidence is at historic lows. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. I'm running for Secretary of State to restore transparency, honesty, security, and lawfulness to our elections.'
In a video announcing his bid for the state's top election official, Kolodin walks toward the camera with a slightly blurred Arizona Capitol building in the background. In the video, Kolodin claims that the head of the Arizona Republican Party, Gina Swoboda, asked him to run and endorsed him.
But Swoboda issued a statement later on Monday saying that she hadn't endorsed Kolodin and wouldn't endorse any candidate in the Republican primary. She added that she would support Kolodin if he wins the primary, as she had previously said she would.
In fact, Swoboda is strongly considering a run for the office herself, something she told multiple reporters on Monday.
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Since he took office, Kolodin has been an outspoken member of the House Elections Committee, where he's advocated for significant changes to the state's election laws, many of them based on conspiracy theories that have fundamentally reshaped how Republicans view elections in Arizona and across the country.
During some of those meetings, Kolodin chided those who don't believe claims that elections are marred by widespread fraud or have outcomes that are rigged by elections officials.
'These days, I feel like I'm living in the Orwellian world,' Kolodin said during a House Municipal Oversight and Elections Committee meeting in February 2024. ''We trust our election officials. They would never put their thumb on the scale. They would never try to cheat.' Well, we know that's demonstrably false, and it's demonstrably false in the way a 6th grader could know that it's demonstrably false.'
His evidence was that Donald Trump was not on GOP primary election ballots in two states — Colorado and Maine — after his candidacy was challenged on the grounds that he was ineligible to serve under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because he incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
In Maine, the secretary of state determined Trump couldn't appear on the ballot. But in Colorado, the Democratic secretary of state allowed him on the ballot only to have the state Supreme Court rule that he was barred by the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled that decision, and Trump appeared on the ballot in all 50 states.
Kolodin supported legislative changes that would have made it easier for people like Kari Lake to challenge the results of an election, to get rid of no-excuse early voting and to return the state to all-precinct voting with precincts capped at 1,000 voters, an idea that experts at the county level said would be unworkable.
For years, representatives of Arizona's rural counties begged Kolodin and the other Republicans on the Elections Committee to consider how difficult and costly it would be to implement some of the election changes that they supported. But Kolodin said during a January meeting that he only really believed the complaints from the rural counties after former Freedom Caucus member Justin Heap took office as Maricopa County Recorder and relayed the same concerns to him.
'To be honest, we've never really had somebody that we trusted on the other side to tell us these things in a way that we would believe them,' Kolodin said during a Jan. 15 House Ad Hoc Committee on Election Integrity and Florida-style Voting Systems meeting.
Kolodin was the chairman of that panel, and he drafted legislation aimed at speeding up the state's election results, based on systems already being used in Florida. The proposal passed through the House and the Senate, both under Republican control, but was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. A similar resolution, which would bypass Hobbs to be sent straight to voters in 2026, passed through the House on a party line vote and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.
Kolodin was the driving force behind an election timeline fix bill that passed with bipartisan support in February 2024, which will allow voters who drop off their ballot in person on Election Day to show identification and have their ballot tabulated immediately, instead of dropping it off for signature verification. The change, meant to speed up the reporting of election results, will take effect in 2026.
This year, Kolodin sponsored legislation that would repeal the law banning Arizonans from owning machine guns, silencers, sawed-off shotguns and even pipe bombs.
He was reelected in November. It is unclear if he will resign his legislative post to mount his statewide campaign.
Fontes, who has passed on opportunities to run for governor and Congress, has not announced whether he's planning a reelection bid.
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