He is the Arizona coordinator for the Coalition of Western States, an organization that opposes the activities of the Bureau of Land Management and supported the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.
[8] A member of the militia group Oath Keepers, Finchem was the unsuccessful Republican Party nominee in the 2022 election for Secretary of State of Arizona.
[12] After graduating high school, he joined the Kalamazoo, Michigan department of public safety, working first as a firefighter and then as a police officer.
[13] Finchem retired from the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety in 1999; personnel records included the note "poor rating, would not rehire".
[12][13] He later became vice president of Clean Power Technologies LLC, an Idaho-based company that claimed to generate and distribute sustainable energy "without wires, anywhere around the world".
[17] Finchem and Leach defeated Democrats Corin Hammond and Barry McCain (write-in candidate) in the 2016 general election.
[12] In 2016, Finchem introduced legislation that would prohibit Arizona from implementing presidential executive orders, directives issued by federal agencies, and U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
[3] In 2019 he introduced a bill to create a code of ethics for teachers which consisted primarily of text from a report published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
"[20][21] As of 2021, Finchem was a member of the House of Representatives' committees on the Judiciary, on Military Affairs & Public Safety, and on Natural Resources, Energy & Water.
[27] During the election campaign, Finchem published a tweet calling Arizona Democratic politicians "liars and deceivers" whose "loyalty is to George Soros and Mike Bloomberg.
[31][32] On his own Gab account, Finchem has pushed the Soros conspiracy theory, as well as claims that the Central Intelligence Agency controls the media.
[34] In April 2022, Finchem and Kari Lake sued state officials, seeking to ban electronic voting machines from being used in his 2022 election.
[35] In August 2022, U.S. District Judge John Tuchi dismissed the suit, writing that Lake and Finchem "articulated only conjectural allegations of potential injuries" and thus lacked standing.
[37][38] In December 2022, Tuchi sanctioned Lake's lawyers in this suit, including Alan Dershowitz, for making "false, misleading, and unsupported" assertions during the case, and making claims without "an adequate factual or legal basis grounded in a reasonable pre-filing inquiry"; he ordered the plaintiffs to pay the defendants' attorney fees.
[35] Tuchi said the sanctions would show that the court does not tolerate litigants "furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process".
[39] Finchem and Lake's appeal, aimed at banning electronic voting machines, was rejected in October 2022 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which highlighted that "counsel for plaintiffs conceded that their arguments were limited to potential future hacking, and not based on any past harm", and voiced agreement "with the district court that plaintiffs' speculative allegations that voting machines may be hackable are insufficient to establish an injury".
[41][42] Finchem filed a lawsuit in December 2022 to have the election "nullified and redone," but it was dismissed with prejudice that month by Maricopa County Superior Court judge Melissa Julian, confirming Democrat Adrian Fontes' victory, as well as the victory of Democrat Katie Hobbs over Republican Kari Lake who had also filed suit to overturn the election.
The report was based on extrapolations from a non-random sample of a much smaller number of voters and was rejected by county elections officials and political scientists.
[65] A coalition of community organizations subsequently called for the expulsion of Finchem and six other Arizona Republican lawmakers who advocated overturning the 2020 election.
"[3] On his Pinterest account, Finchem kept a "Treason Watch List" with photos of prominent Democrats, including Jesse Jackson, Janet Napolitano, and John Kerry; he also posted about stockpiling ammunition.
[69] In 2017, Finchem baselessly described the white supremacist Unite the Right rally as a "deep state psyop" carried out by Democrats.
[29] Finchem also attended a Newport Beach, California fundraiser, promoted by ex-Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, with Nicole Nogrady, a conspiracy theorist who claimed that fetal tissue was in the food supply and that the September 11 attacks were a federal government plot.
[13] In August 2022, he attended a Wisconsin gathering of the "Church Militant" movement, a self-proclaimed "Christian militia" that says that it combats "sin, the devil and the demonic rulers of the darkness of this world.