It didn’t take long for the new chair of the Republican Party to get a taste of his own medicine.
New AZGOP Chairman Sergio Arellano, a native Tucsonan who now lives in Glendale, has a long history in Southern Arizona politics, and “election integrity” has been one of his go-to issues.
Back in 2014, for example, Arellano sued Santa Cruz County to force county officials to release records about vote tabulation machines they hadn’t had to release before. That lawsuit netted him attorney’s fees from the county after a judge ruled the county delayed releasing public records (as Curt reported for the Nogales International at the time). And it boosted Arellano's credibility among election-skeptic activists.
Now, he’s on the other side of the table, trying to stay ahead of potential election fraud claims in his own election.
Just two days after Arellano won his election to AZGOP chair, officials announced that they had to suspend vote-counting for the party’s bylaws, which were cast the same day he was elected chair.
The election snafu happened when the party met last month in Prescott Valley to pick a new party chair after former Chair Gina Swoboda decided not to run for reelection. They did their rounds of voting, as our sister newsletter, the Arizona Agenda, reported, and chose Arellano.
But the party decided to count the roughly 1,400 votes by hand, instead of just running them through a tabulation machine. (After all, those machines are the devil incarnate, right?)
The counting took forever, and the meeting dragged on for hours.
After they announced Arellano won, everybody went home. But two days later, Arellano sent out a message to the state committeemen saying they hadn’t actually counted every vote.
“Upon my election, it was brought to my attention that the tabulation of the Bylaws ballots for the 2026 Mandatory meeting was incomplete due to the time limitations of the facility contract,” he wrote. “I was also immediately notified that a decision was made to suspend counting and transport the ballots for later tabulation.”
Yeah, they literally had to “stop the count.”
Arellano assured the state committeemen that “the ballots and other election related materials are currently under dual control and camera surveillance. I personally witnessed the delivery and the securing of the ballots.”
A full week after the election, party officials announced they’d finished tallying the votes.
“As someone who believes in secure elections, it was great that we could lead by example,” said Arellano in a statement.
The irony is rich here and if we were more like the MAGA crowd, we’d take that little snafu and start shouting “Election fraud at the Arizona GOP!!!!” while we frantically typed up fundraising emails.
Alas, that’s a little too much, even for us.
Still, we’ll have the popcorn ready if the Arizona Republican Party turns its election conspiracies on itself.
And it wouldn't be the first time.
It’s worth remembering that the 2021 vote for Arizona GOP chair also ended with a stink.
Party members, including Arellano, demanded an audit after Kelli Ward beat out Arellano for the chairmanship.
Tucson is a GOP powerhouse?
Before we get into Arellano’s political background, we have to highlight the simple fact that, all of a sudden, Tucsonans have a direct tie to the top of the Arizona GOP.
And Arellano wasn’t the only candidate with Tucson connections. Kathleen Winn, chair of the Pima County Republican Party, was another top vote-getter for party chair.
As you might imagine in a county dominated by Democrats, the Pima County Republican Party doesn’t have a lot of political clout.
Their lane has been mostly relegated to posting memes and showing up at public meetings to criticize Democratic elected officials and their policies.
But now that a former Tucsonan is in charge of the state Republican Party, Southern Arizona may get a little more love from statewide Republicans.
And just because Arellano, the first Latino to be the chair of the Arizona GOP, was born and raised in Tucson doesn’t mean he’s going to add a blue hue to the state GOP.
He’s a MAGA conservative with close ties to Trump.
A little about Arellano
Arellano has put a lot of work into his political and public service credentials since he rode the Tea Party wave into politics in the early 2010s.
He served on various boards and commissions in Southern Arizona, like the Continental School District Board.
He also worked as a field director for the Republican National Committee, where he led Hispanic outreach efforts, and as the strategic initiatives director for the Arizona Republican Party. He has served as a spokesperson for Spanish-language and international media for the Republican National Committee, the Arizona GOP and the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. And he was Arizona’s representative to Trump’s National Latino Advisory Board.
He now works as an advisor to Arizona House Speaker Steve Montenegro.
Before any of that, Arellano enlisted in the United States Army at just 17 years old and was wounded in Iraq.
Arellano’s instagram pics.
Long before the likes of President Donald Trump and Kari Lake brought the “rigged elections” hysteria to Arizona, he was usually in the mix whenever “we’re just asking questions” style claims were made about local elections.
He was also briefly the publisher of the Arizona Daily Independent, a conservative Southern Arizona news outlet.
In 2018, Arellano ran against Rep. Raúl Grijalva, but he didn’t make it past the Republican primary. At the time, two years into the Trump administration, Arellano told Joe that the district, not partisan politics, would be his priority.
“As long as our policies are helping on the ground, I can support (Trump),” Arellano said in 2018.
These days, he doesn’t hedge his pro-Trump ideology quite as much.
Since he was elected chair, he’s been relishing the fight between Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes over Mayes’ comments about the possibility that masked ICE agents might get shot by gun-toting Arizonans taking advantage of the state’s Stand Your Ground laws.
His Twitter presence checks all the conservative boxes, mostly retweeting other Republicans, clips from conservative news outlets, activists, and right-wing interest groups that are active in the state. (If you’re interested in what Arellano is thinking about as the elections approach, you can subscribe to his newsletter here.)
Arellano has nine months to help Republicans win back the Governor's Office and key statewide offices — all while managing what is shaping up to be brutal GOP primaries for superintendent of public instruction and secretary of state.
He'll be doing it all while managing a base that treats every tabulation machine with suspicion — a suspicion that people like Arellano spent years helping to cultivate.
Ransom demands: Savannah Guthrie and her siblings issued an on-camera statement saying they will pay a ransom for the return of their 84-year-old mother, Nancy, the Arizona Daily Star’s Cathalena Burch and Norma Coile report. Several ransom demands have shown up, including one that officials say contained information that wasn’t known to the public. One of the notes came from a California man who now faces federal charges for sending in a phony ransom demand, KOLD’s Peter Valencia reports. Amid the chaos and lack of legitimate leads, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos is stuck handling questions he can’t answer on a national stage, saying sheepishly “I’m not used to everybody hanging on my words and then trying to hold me accountable for what I say,” the New York Times reports.
Making it official: A meeting of the Arizona Schools for the Deaf and Blind directors ended in tears for some parents who wanted the school to stay in Tucson, Shannon Conner reports for the Arizona Luminaria. The board voted 5-2 on Thursday to go ahead with the plan to move the school to Oro Valley next school year. The move will force many parents, including many whose children are vision-impaired, to find a new school.
New election rules: Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a bill into law that was crafted in part to force Pima County to allow observers to watch ballot-counting at more locations. Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin’s HB2022 also moved up the date of primary elections from the first Tuesday in August to the second-to-last Tuesday in July, making that the permanent primary date after lawmakers temporarily changed it for the 2024 election, per the Republic’s Ray Stern.
Epstein is everywhere: The University of Arizona cancelled an annual scientific research conference after it was revealed Jeffrey Epstein helped fund it, the Republic’s Ronald J. Hansen and Helen Rummel report. UA officials claimed they didn’t know Epstein helped finance the Science of Consciousness conference, but Stuart Hameroff, a UA professor who helped organize the conference, said he knew Epstein was involved as far back as 2017.
“The University of Arizona and conference organizers have determined this was necessary due to several speakers and organizers including myself being mentioned in the Epstein files,” Hameroff said on Twitter.
No justice, no classes: The recent nationwide protests of ICE led to just one-fourth of TUSD students attending classes that day, per the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram. In the days leading up to the Feb. 2 protest, more than 1,000 teachers submitted requests for personal leave, forcing the district to shut down 22 schools for the day. Republican state lawmakers quickly condemned the teachers, saying “families paid the price for political tactics that do not belong in public education,” Shira Tanzer reports for KTAR. Now, TUSD officials are conducting mandatory training sessions for teachers and staff on what to do if ICE agents show up on campus, like learning how to identify a judicial warrant and how to protect students’ identities, Noor Haghighi reports for Arizona Public Media.
Now, we don’t want to throw stones for being tossed out of a bar.
Who among us, right?…
But we did get a good chuckle out of this Daily Beast story detailing how now-former U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino was tossed out of a bar on the Las Vegas just for being Greg Bovino.
And he was having so much fun tossing back red wine with the boys!
The Daily Beast notes that it doesn’t appear Bovino did anything wrong while getting tipsy at the Strip sports bar Bottled Blonde, and he wasn’t kicked out to make a political statement. The bar escorted him off the premises over fears his very presence could create a problematic environment for the other patrons.
It’s not his first 86 in recent memory. Just last week, he was stripped of his role fronting Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.
Or as the Daily Beast put it:
“Border Patrol’s commander is developing a habit of getting kicked out of places where he’s worn out his welcome.”