He won the Republican primary with around 59.8% of the vote, defeating former Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda, who received around 40.2%. As a Republican candidate challenging Democratic incumbent Adrian Fontes for Arizona secretary of state, Alexander Kolodin has made election security and voting procedures central to his campaign. If elected, he will become Arizona’s chief election officer.
Before entering politics, Kolodin had practised election law in Arizona for more than a decade. Kolodin’s campaign heavily focuses on election security, voter choice and public confidence in election results. Furthermore, he promised greater transparency and accountability in the secretary of state’s office, saying election administration should reflect voters’ choices without partisan interference. As a state representative, he has served on committees dealing with elections, the judiciary, public safety and regulatory oversight. He addressed the election calendar, ballot signature correction deadlines and access for authorized party representatives observing voting activities. Kolodin has linked citizenship verification to election security and has backed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act , which requires documentary proof of US citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. He argues that the measure would help ensure that only eligible US citizens appear on voter rolls. He has framed this issue as a direct point of disagreement with his political opponents. As part of the disciplinary action, he agreed to complete legal education courses on professional ethics. The defamation case was dismissed after a judge ruled that it had been filed primarily to harass the lawmaker. Fontes pushed back against the remarks, saying “if you say Sinaloa cartel lawyer one more time, we’re going to have a personal problem, Mr. Kolodin”.
In 2014, he fought for the public’s right to access election data stored on central count computers. He also challenged instructions issued to Maricopa County voters who voted by mail in 2020 and filed a lawsuit against Adrian Fontes in 2024, alleging that Arizona was not complying with federal voter registration requirements under the National Voter Registration Act, according to his campaign. Kolodin later entered the state legislature and was elected to represent Arizona’s 3rd Legislative District in 2022, taking office in January 2023. In February 2026, the Arizona House passed House Bill 2022, an election related bill that he sponsored. In December 2023, Kolodin was reprimanded by the State Bar of Arizona and placed on 18 months of probation over his role in lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results and a separate defamation case against a Democratic lawmaker. During his 2026 campaign, Kolodin repeatedly brought up a case involving an alleged member of the Sinaloa drug cartel while debating Fontes.
Furthermore, Kolodin was in the news due to his conflict with his Democratic incumbent, Adrian Fontes.
He plans to strengthen election systems, ensure every legal vote is counted accurately and make election results available faster without compromising accuracy, according to his campaign website. He has also said that he would require county recorders to check Arizona’s voter rolls against the federal SAVE database to identify US noncitizens.
