The victory of Adrian Fontes, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, may come to be seen as one of the most significant results of the 2022 elections in terms of the future of American democracy.

Fontes, a former Marine, managed to fend off one of the most contentious Republican election deniers in a bitterly fought and exceedingly close race. His opponent, Mark Finchem, is a state lawmaker who has been a member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and was present at the US Capitol on the day of the 6 January 2021 insurrection.

Finchem has made repeated efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in Arizona in the 2020 election, in favor of his idol Donald Trump.

By frustrating Finchem’s efforts to secure the secretary of state position, Fontes has prevented both local and federal election administration in Arizona falling into the hands of an avid opponent of democratic norms. Had Finchem come out on top, as some polls suggested he might in the final stretch of the campaign, he would have been placed to radically alter Arizona’s handling of elections and could even have subverted the outcome of the 2024 presidential battle.

In an interview with the Guardian shortly before election day, Fontes said that a Finchem victory would have threatened “the fate of the republic, and the free world too if you accept that America is still its leader”.

As Arizona’s secretary of state-elect, Fontes will now become second in line of succession to the governor. He will be in a strong position to influence how elections are conducted in the state, including the presidential race in two years’ time in which Trump has indicated he is minded to stand again.

In his bid to voters, Fontes promised that were he to win he would preserve mail-in voting, a popular way of casting ballots in Arizona that Finchem had threatened to restrict claiming without evidence that it was riddled with fraud.

Fontes is no stranger to electoral disputes. In 2020 he was the recorder of Maricopa, Arizona’s most populous county, which put him at the centre of the storm over the election count there in which Republicans demanded a much-derided “audit” of the count.