Guests - Seth Keshel, Jack Dona
Four days out from Arizona's primary, with the president's overnight address on election security still echoing, Kathleen Winn built her Friday broadcast around the one issue she and both of her guests treat as the foundation of everything else: whether the vote can be trusted. First a reminder for listeners caught off guard — last year's five mail-in elections left many assuming they were still on the early-ballot list when they were not. "You still can vote," Winn said. Go to a voting center today, or vote in person Tuesday. "We need your vote." From there she turned to two men who have spent years inside the mechanics of Arizona elections: a data analyst and Army veteran who forecasts vote trends, and a retired Master Sergeant who investigates election process.
Seth Keshel: 'To Me, It's the Only Issue'
Seth Keshel — the former Army captain, intelligence analyst, and author Winn calls "Captain K" — does not hedge on where election integrity ranks. "To me, it's the only issue," he said. His reasoning is structural: Republicans poll better on nearly every substantive question — immigration, the border, foreign policy, taxes, business — yet keep underperforming in close statewide and presidential contests, sometimes against candidates who barely campaigned. "If we don't have an election system that reflects the will of the people," he asked, "then how can we expect policies to reflect the will of the people?" As a self-described numbers man, he trusts the math over the mood: "Numbers don't lie. They're not emotional." When results diverge from the trends, that gap raises the flag.
Much of the hour tracked the president's speech, which Keshel said was organized into five declassified findings. The first unveiled what the administration presented as proof of foreign tampering with elections infrastructure by nations running dedicated interference cells — China singled out, alongside North Korea and Venezuela, with activity dating back to the 2018 midterms. The second described how the intelligence community concealed breaches of that infrastructure from the president and his administration — behavior Keshel called consistent with "exactly what the administrative state has done the entire Trump era." The third asserted that electronic voting systems, including Smartmatic systems, can be manipulated. The fourth identified registration fraud, focusing on Muskegon County, Michigan — an incident Keshel said he singled out in his own book, where roughly 10,000 registration forms were dropped off with the city at once, flagged by the clerk, then buried for years. The fifth returned to non-citizens on the rolls.
That last point drew the segment's most striking numbers, and Keshel corrected a misreading in real time. A DHS investigation, he said, examined only a partial count of four blue states — one of them California — and confirmed roughly 278,000 non-citizen registrations. When Winn asked whether that meant a fifth of the electorate were illegal immigrants, Keshel clarified: that quarter-million-plus surfaced in a sample representing only about a fifth of the electorate examined. Extrapolated, he argued, "one can safely assume that there are multiple millions of non-citizens registered to vote" — before even counting duplicate or deceased registrations.
Keshel located his own focus in two "vectors": voter registration and mail-in balloting. He finds it telling that as much of the world rejects postal voting, "American blue and purple states are moving toward it and expanding it." But he rejected the habit of sorting election problems into a single bucket, insisting vulnerabilities run through many channels — including the machines. He pointed to a 2025 race in Valencia County, New Mexico, where 204 extra ballots were run into the state's tabulation center in what was confirmed to be a machine error. His conclusion: "Even if there's no malice, the machines are creating results that are not genuine."
The conversation drifted into shared memory of 2018, the year Winn said "we got cheated." Steve Gaynor, she noted, led on election night for Secretary of State before late counting handed the office to Katie Hobbs — after Gaynor had beaten Michele Reagan handily in the primary — the same cycle Arizona lost Martha McSally's Senate seat. Keshel recalled winning a countywide Maricopa Community College Governing Board seat that year, joking that as a down-ballot candidate he somehow outpolled Doug Ducey: "So that probably didn't happen either."
On the demographics reshaping the state, Keshel was blunt about why Republicans keep losing ground: urbanization. As cities grow, he argued, they demand more government, pack in populations, and default to policies that entrench the left. He cited 2018 Texas exit polling in which California transplants broke for Ted Cruz by about ten points while native Texans supposedly favored Beto O'Rourke — Cruz surviving by under three. Maricopa County, he said, is being similarly transformed, with old-school North Phoenix Republicans and a shifting LDS vote drifting into "the new left." Layered on top is Arizona's reliance on the mail: about 75 percent of the state's vote arrives by mail, and roughly 77 percent comes from just two counties, Maricopa and Pima. Most Californians leaving the state now lean conservative, he added; the real damage was done earlier, when California-style politics flipped Colorado two decades ago and helped "perma-blue" Oregon and Washington.
Asked how the party reaches an 18-to-34 cohort for whom "free stuff sounds good," Keshel predicted much of it "will sort out organically." His theory of modern turnout is that mail-heavy states have erased the low-turnout election entirely, because "the ballots are simply collected like a quota." The more interesting movement, he argued, is internal to the left, which is being overtaken by a faction aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America — "ironically, there's very little democratic about them." Where the Trump revolution simply overran the GOP, the Democratic Party's presidential machinery has safeguards: superdelegates that let it thwart its own voters, as when Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in 2016, when the 2020 field cleared for Joe Biden to edge Sanders one-on-one, and when the 2024 nomination was handed to Kamala Harris. That pattern, Keshel said, is now producing urban backlash, and he doubts the DSA brand travels to the heart of the country. As evidence of the fracture, he pointed to Senator John Fetterman — roughly negative-60 approval among Democrats and plus-65 among Republicans — whom he expects to leave the party. "Six years ago, Tulsi Gabbard becoming a Republican was probably more unlikely than John Fetterman today," he said, predicting a voting-record reversal like Jeff Van Drew's. Winn credited Fetterman with "speaking truth" from a Democratic perspective, and both saw the left's overreach in Maine, where Graham Platner's collapse has drawn eight would-be replacements — a scramble they hope helps Susan Collins hold her seat.
Turning to 2026, Keshel offered a detailed forecast. The Senate is a likely Republican hold: the map is tough for Democrats, who would need to win two of Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska even to reach a narrow edge. "I don't see that happening," he said, noting Democrats are also fighting for North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire just to stay in the minority. The House is another matter. The old adage that a president's party loses seats — true in 20 of 23 midterms since 1937 — is void this cycle, he argued, because redistricting has redrawn the map so drastically that only about 23 seats are truly decisive. His expectation: "Neither party has a high ceiling or a low floor," with the winner likely holding something like 218 to 222 seats. One of those is CD6, where he and Winn both live. He rates Juan Ciscomani a "50-50 coin toss" against Democrat JoAnna Mendoza, whom he tied to the DSA — a race Ciscomani could win comfortably in a red-wave year, but this is not that year, "because the reason you got a red wave is because there's a dangerous Democrat president in office."
At the state level, Keshel called LD17 the tipping-point district — the seat a Democratic legislative majority would need after not holding one since the 1960s. He praised the Republican ticket there of Rachel Keshel and John Winchester, and read the Democrats' decision to run a "double shot" as a gamble that could cost them both seats, since single-shot Democrats like Kevin Volk, who won in 2024, tend to fade when two candidates share the ticket. He counted 23 safe districts and only seven genuinely competitive, judging Teresa Martinez safe, Michele Peña in LD23 in real jeopardy, and Alex Kolodin and Joseph Chaplik's district strong enough to elect two Republicans on partisanship alone. Vince Leach, he reminded listeners, won his Senate seat by just two points in 2024, and a bitter intraparty primary in that area threatens to "poison the well" in a left-leaning year.
On the marquee race, the avowed poll-hater made an exception: "I have no doubt that Andy Biggs is on his way to a massive victory." Trump's endorsement record, he said, is "the coup de grâce" for a candidate already favored. The suspense, in his view, is Biggs's lieutenant-governor pick — likely a woman, though Keshel cautioned against "the little GOP diversity pick," since Republican voters "want to build a coalition." On the other side, Winn floated rumors that Hobbs might choose RINO former Mesa mayor John Giles, and noted Jimmy McCain had declined even as the McCain family hosted a fundraiser for the governor.
Keshel's closing prescription was an urban strategy the GOP keeps avoiding. His frustration is that Republicans are "always so comfortable only going to the place where you can go to the barbecue joint and talk about building the wall," while getting "absolutely slaughtered" in the cities. Maricopa is R+7 and had voted Republican for president in every election since 1952 until 2020; with a coherent message on crime and violence and "maybe backing off a little bit of the conservatism with some urban solutions," he argued, Republicans could carry it 60-40 "and you'd never lose the state again." Pair that with serious election reform and Arizona could become, in his phrase, "Florida West." On the November ballot, he sees a real chance for Arizona to be the first state to pass the SAVE Act — stripped down after some senators removed address verification from the mail-in system, but "at least a start" — crediting Rachel Keshel and Alex Kolodin for getting it there, and citing the resounding defeat of ranked-choice voting last cycle as evidence the electorate is motivated. His book, he told listeners, is The American War on Election Corruption, with a foreword by Newt Gingrich.
Kathleen Winn: The Case for Pima County
Between guests, Winn made the argument closest to home. She has worked on election integrity since 2018, she said, and keeps returning to the close races decided not on election night but in the days of counting that follow — Gaynor's lead erased, and Abe Hamadeh's loss to Kris Mayes turning on mail-in and late ballots. "You say, oh, well, that's just one race," she said — but that one race seated an attorney general who has since sued President Trump 44 times, a fixation Winn called "obsessive" and disconnected from the state's bottom line, alongside suits against businesses that wanted to invest here.
That, for Winn, is the through-line to Arizona's economy. A state that ranked fourth in economic growth, she said, has fallen to 47th — "do we want to be 50th? We've only got three more to go." Drawing on three decades in business, she framed enterprise as "the engine that runs a city," and worried aloud about replacing civic pillars like Jim Click, the Tucson dealer and philanthropist who recently sold his business. Pima County has medicine and the university, she noted, but few high-paying jobs and a quality-of-life problem that scares off employers: roughly 2,500 homeless residents amid mental illness, drugs, and danger, a recent fentanyl bust, and a Tucson Unified School District hollowed out as younger families leave for places they consider safe. Her plea was to vote on substance, not likeability: "It's not about, do you want to have a beer with them. It's about what do they stand for? How will they govern?"
She tied the state's direction directly to election control. The recent Pima County court victory, she said, was argued by Jeff Clark — who represented the president — with the Oversight Project deliberately choosing Pima precisely because it gets overlooked next to "the kingdom of Maricopa." And she pointed to the spectacle of Maricopa's own Republican Board of Supervisors fighting for a year and a half to retain control of elections as something that "should terrify everybody," because "it's not even about their party." Her bottom line for listeners was a single action: get the ballot off the counter. Vote at home if you like, she said, but sign it, bring ID today, Monday, or Tuesday, and turn it in to be certified on the spot rather than merely dropped off — a change that gets it counted immediately. Voting sites, she added, are listed at PimaGOP.org and through the county recorder. She also flagged down-ballot stakes: an uncontested LD17 primary for Rachel Keshel and John Winchester, and a write-in candidate, Jeff Rhodes, in Supervisor District 5 — a long shot that could eventually crack the board's single-viewpoint majority and let a second perspective onto the dais.
The week had been hard in a smaller way too. The family had put down one of their horses, Liberty, at 33 — a loss Winn carried into her sign-off. "Life is happening around us," she said, "and we want the best life that we can have."
Jack Dona: 'Once They Pull the Ladder Up'
Master Sergeant Jack Dona, U.S. Army retired, has worked the process side of Arizona's election fights, and he framed the president's address as "a capstone event" — the moment a lot of what had been dismissed as conspiracy theory was, in his telling, "proven out to be not conspiracy theories, but actually based in fact." His diagnosis is about power and access. Behind the recorder battles in Pima and Maricopa counties, he sees "entrenched special interests that absolutely do not want transparency" — business elites who "want to put their fingers on the scale" and install advocates who will do their bidding. "I wish it was more complicated than that," he said. "It's not."
His prime exhibit was Maricopa. Dona accused four Republican supervisors and disgraced outgoing recorder Stephen Richer — "more of an advocate for Adrian Fontes than he ever was for the Republican voter" — of never intending to clean the rolls. He offered a personal illustration: his father, dead 14 years, was recorded as having voted after his death from an address he no longer lived at. When Dona brought the documentation to Richer early in his term, he said, the answer was that fixing the rolls was "too big a job." The recent Arizona Supreme Court ruling restoring recorder Justin Heap's authority was the right outcome, both agreed, but a year and a half had been wasted — which Dona argued was the entire point. "The process is the punishment," he said, describing a deliberate strategy to run out the clock past the deadlines when any real change could be made without triggering another round of litigation.
For the deeper pattern, Dona reached for a line from his father, who came from a socialist country: once subversives "gain control of your election system" and take positions of power, "they pull the ladder up into the attic and then they shut the attic, and you can't get them out." His research group, he said, concentrated on process rather than raw numbers — chain-of-custody problems in Pima County, process errors in Pinal County's 2022 election, and trouble with electronic poll books. The commonality listeners should notice, he argued, is that the errors "all in the end seem to benefit one party" — the Democrats. "It's just a wild coincidence, Jack," Winn deadpanned. "I hate when you use facts to make all these false allegations."
Dona devoted a long stretch to Lisa Marra, the former Cochise County elections official. At a packed GOP meeting years ago, he recalled, a motion to commend her sailed toward a vote until he rose to ask whether the room knew she had been "relentlessly attacking" the sitting president — a question that dropped the count of raised hands to about ten and killed the motion. He described her later testifying to Congress and suggesting the federal government build "an enemies list" for anyone questioning elections. Winn added her own courtroom chapter: Marra, she said, did "a terrible job explaining why people in uniform should not get to vote in uniform," a policy struck down in federal court, after which the Tucson Police Department circulated an internal memo asking officers to give 24 hours' notice — as if, Winn scoffed, an officer working a 12-hour Election Day shift knows in advance when crimes will occur. Dona summed up the method as encroachment, likening it to a shark: "It bumps you," and if you thrash and try to swim away, "it recognizes this is prey" — so "you've got to fight back."
The intimidation, both said, has been most concentrated in Pima County. Dona reported a call from an election worker and predicted a lawsuit over Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly's observer procedures. Winn said she has collected 42 affidavits — unequal bathroom access, discrimination against people with disabilities, even bans on a small purse holding car keys — describing a campaign "to make it uncomfortable for you to be an observer." Pima, she noted, was the only county in the state without observers for four years, and the only one operating a mobile voting center that had to have an observer forced onto it: "Pima County is the unicorn of the state. They don't want you to have a voice." Dona put the worldview in starker terms, tracing it to Marx's Das Kapital: "Their religion is government." That, he argued, is why the right is increasingly treated "as the enemy," why national media figures could say the rules had to be thrown out "because it was Trump," and why captured election systems eventually yield the "crazy rulings" seen in blue-state courts.
The pair turned to Fontes directly. Two days before the broadcast, Dona noted, the Secretary of State sent the Department of Justice a letter insisting Arizona has "a long history of adherence to voter registration requirements" and has demanded citizenship evidence for more than two decades. Both called it misleading, citing federal-only ballots that require no such proof. Dona recounted a legislator asking him to run down a startling figure — some 20,000 UOCAVA (overseas and military) votes attributed to Arizona in 2020, "a division, four brigades" worth — only to hit a wall after Fontes, he said, removed that data from the public access portal. The military portion of that voting, he added, has been controlled by the Secretary of War since the Reagan era, making overseas verification nearly impossible. He also flagged a passport fair hosted by Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva's office in Tucson, which he said he reported to the FBI and DOJ, questioning why a member of Congress sponsors such an event. "I think they're just having them apply and then having them registered to vote," Winn said. "If I don't laugh, Jack, I will cry."
Both connected the local fights to a national argument. Dona pointed to ABC and NBC declining to carry the president's address as a message to more than half the country: "We know better than you." Winn laid out the sequence as she sees it — that fraudulent ballots in 2020 required a border surge to cover, followed by registration drives, commercial licenses, and rising crime, all under the banner of "too big to rig." Their shared conclusion was urgency on the SAVE Act, which Arizona could pass first. "If we don't pass the SAVE Act," Dona warned, "then we might as well just hand over our guns, hand over our property and say, come and get us." Winn credited Rachel Keshel, Alex Kolodin, and the legislature for bypassing Governor Hobbs to put it on the ballot, and returned to her own mission as Pima County GOP chair: "I don't want your money. I want it for the party. But if we're doing the job you elected me to do — which is to protect your vote — then go out and vote."
The Iran Question
Winn shifted gears to Iran, and Dona — reflecting his and his husband's military background woven through the show — offered an analyst's read. Iran, he said, is on its way to losing control of the Strait of Hormuz, with the U.S. military maneuvering to protect the oil and talk of ground troops that would not be American. His warning was political: the conflict "is going to become an issue between now and November," with opponents casting it as another Vietnam.
To explain why every ceasefire has failed, Dona started with the nature of the regime. Iran is a theocracy "ruled by religious ideology," not a Western or capitalist state, and its militant arm, the IRGC, is staffed by people "that have participated in the mass murder of not hundreds, but thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of their own citizens." Any deal that transitions Iran toward representative government, he argued, means those officers — not just the leadership but low-level noncommissioned officers by the thousands — "understand that they have to fight to the finish. They cannot surrender," because escape with "a couple of suitcases full of a hundred thousand dollars" and a flight to the French Riviera is reserved for "the top cats." His verdict was flat: "No deal is going to work with these people. They've gone too far. Everything was designed to stall" — time in which he is confident Russia and China tried to help Iran regroup.
Winn described a campaign that has stopped treating pauses as anything but weakness — "every time we gave them a timeout, we called it a ceasefire, and they were doubling down." She cited a report that the U.S. military "emptied a third of its deepest missile magazine into Iran," and Dona explained the logic behind it: Iran spent decades layering artillery, missiles, and drones around itself precisely so that dislodging the regime would be so costly it could fast-track a nuclear weapon behind the shield. "If the Iranians succeed," he said, "it will be the blueprint for every dictator" with a resource to protect.
Where the two landed hardest was on the people versus the regime. The Iranian protesters, Winn argued, "need to be armed and they need to have the victory, because victory begets victory" — handed a free country, she said, they would not value it the way they would value one they bled for. Dona agreed the regime is "heartless, soulless, evil," a government that "killed athletes" and shows "no regard for human life," and noted that not even the American socialist left is defending it. He predicted that a surgical extraction — "Delta Force or Green Berets or SEALs," in his framing, "like we did in Venezuela" — followed by the people reclaiming their country would bring "a bloodbath," with perpetrators who "killed their children in the streets" facing the gallows, though he acknowledged many IRGC foot soldiers manning intimidation checkpoints have already been killed. And he closed on Iran's endgame: pressing the Houthis to choke the strait and spike oil prices, inflicting enough economic pain that American voters hand Congress back to the Democrats in November, triggering "the impeachment parade" and letting the regime survive. "That is their play. They're playing against time."
Winn wrapped the week there, promising results by Wednesday and thanking Dona "for all the work you do to restore election integrity in Cochise County" while she keeps "holding up Pima County." She signed off as she often does — "the last of the Goldwater gals," a voter here since 1976 — sending listeners into the final weekend before Tuesday: "Be safe. Make it a great weekend. And God bless you."