PHOENIX (AP) – An Arizona woman accused in 2020 of charges of illegal ballot collecting has apparently conducted a complex operation using her status as a well-known Democratic operative in the border town of San Luis to persuade voters to allow her to assemble and in some cases complete their ballots, according to records received from the Associated Press.
Guillermo Fuentes, 66, and a second woman were charged in December 2020 with one count of misuse of ballots, a practice known as “ballot collection”, which was declared illegal under state law in 2016. Conspiracy charges , falsification and additional charges of ballot misuse were added last October.
Fuentes, a former mayor of San Luis who serves as an elected board member of the Gadsden Primary School District in San Luis, has a court date Thursday on which he can change his guilty plea. Her co-defendant is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a reduced charge a few months ago.
Fuentes is accused of collecting ballots during the 2020 primary elections in violation of a law that allows only a caregiver or family member to return early voting to someone else, and in some cases to fill it out.
Her lawyer, Anne Chapman, said in an email Thursday that she had no comment on the allegations against her client.
But she criticized the Arizona ballot collection law, saying it was preventing minority voters who had historically relied on others to help them vote. She said “this prosecution shows that the law is part of an ongoing anti-democratic, nationwide and national effort to suppress voters.”
Republicans have united around the possibility of widespread fraud by voting in the 2020 election, where former President Donald Trump was defeated. They cited the allegations against Fuentes as part of a broader model of battlefield conditions.
However, there are no indications of this in the investigation reports. They were obtained through a request for public recordings from the Arizona Attorney General’s office, which was made for the first time in February 2021, but was denied. The AP sent a new request last October after more charges were filed against Fuentes. The Attorney General finally provided more than 20 documents outlining the investigation late last week.
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Records show that less than a dozen ballots can be linked to Fuentes, which is not enough to make a difference in all but the narrowest local competitions. She is accused only of illegally handling four ballots.
This is the only case ever filed by the Attorney General under a 2016 law that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.
Investigators said she appears to have used her position as a powerful figure in the highly Mexican American community to get people to give her or others their ballots to return to the ballot box.
The alleged illegal collection of ballots by Fuentes and her accomplice took place in a prominent place in front of a cultural center in San Luis on the day of the primary elections, reports show. Fuentes was at a card table set up by supporters on a list of city council candidates, and was spotted with several envelopes of mail in the mail, taking out the ballots and in some cases marking them.
The ballots were then taken to the cultural center and placed in an urn.
It was filmed by a recording candidate who called the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office. An investigation was launched that day, and about 50 ballots were checked for fingerprints, which were unconvincing. The investigation was taken over by the prosecutor’s office within days, with investigators cooperating with the sheriff’s deputies to interview voters and others, including Fuentes.
Although Fuentes is accused only of actions that appear on videotape and include only a handful of bulletins, investigators believe the effort has gone much further.
Attorney General William Klut, an investigator in the office, wrote in a report that there was some evidence to suggest that Fuentes was actively campaigning for San Luis neighborhoods and collecting ballots, in some cases paying for them.
Collecting ballots in this way was a common voting tactic used by both political parties before Arizona passed the 2016 law. Paying for ballots was never legal.
There are no indications that she or anyone else in Yuma County was collecting ballots in the general election, but investigators from the Attorney General’s Office are still active in Yuma County.
The Republic of Arizona said Tuesday that search warrants were served last month at a nonprofit organization in San Luis. The group’s executive director is chairman of the Yuma County Supervisory Board and said the order sought the cell phone of a councilor in San Luis who may have been involved in illegal ballot collecting.
And at a legislative hearing on Tuesday, where conspiracy theorists testified, the Yuma primary election case was again the focus.
“It’s all about corruption in San Luis and distortion of the city council election,” said Yuma Republican Tim Dunn. “It has been happening for a long time that you have not been able to have free and fair elections in the southern district for decades. And it’s spreading across the country. “
Misuse of ballots is a crime that could result in a possible sentence of up to two years in prison and a $ 150,000 fine.
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