Above: h/t Slate.
Last week the Arizona Capitol Times used this graphic for this Associated Press article Records show coordinated Arizona ballot collection scheme:
An Arizona woman indicted in 2020 on accusations of illegally collecting ballots apparently ran a sophisticated operation using her status as a well-known Democratic operative in the border city of San Luis to persuade voters to let her gather and in some cases fill out their ballots, according to records obtained by The Associated Press.
Guillermina Fuentes, 66, and a second woman were indicted in December 2020 on one count of ballot abuse, a practice commonly known as “ballot harvesting” that was made illegal under a 2016 state law. Additional charges of conspiracy, forgery and an additional ballot abuse charge were added last October.
Fuentes, a former San Luis mayor who serves as an elected board member of the Gadsden Elementary School District in San Luis, has a Thursday court date where she may change her not guilty plea. Her co-defendant awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to a reduced charge several months ago.
Fuentes is accused of collecting ballots during the 2020 primary election in violation of the law that only allows a caregiver or family member to return someone else’s early ballot, and in some cases filling them out.
The right-wing media ate this up last week. Finally some proof of a Democrat, rather than the dozen or so Republicans who have been indicted in the past year or so for ballot fraud. The Pattern of GOP Voter Fraud: “The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, maintains a public database of ballot-fraud cases. A review of the database reveals an astonishing fact: In every listed indictment and conviction for voter fraud or other malfeasance in connection with the 2020 presidential general election, when the culprit’s political affiliation is known he or she turns out to be a Republican or ‘unabashed conservative.’”
Turns out, not so much.
Republicans have rallied around the possibility of widespread voting fraud in the 2020 election where former President Donald Trump was defeated. They’ve pointed to the charges against Fuentes as part of a broader pattern in battleground states.
There is no sign of that in the investigation records, though. They were obtained through a public records request from the Arizona attorney general’s office that was first made 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 laying out the investigation late last week.
The records show that fewer than a dozen ballots could be linked to Fuentes, not enough to make a difference in all but the tightest local races. It is the only case ever brought by the attorney general under the 2016 law, which was upheld by the [radical Republican] U.S. Supreme Court last year.
Investigators said it appears she used her position as a powerful figure in the heavily Mexican American community to get people to give her or others their ballots to return to the polls.
The alleged illegal ballot collection by Fuentes and her co-defendant happened in plain sight outside a cultural center in San Luis on the day of the primary election, the reports show. Fuentes was at a card table set up by supporters of a slate of city council candidates and was spotted with several mail-ballot envelopes, pulling out the ballots and in some cases marking them.
The ballots were then taken inside the cultural center and deposited in a ballot box.
It was videotaped by a write-in candidate who called the Yuma County sheriff. An investigation was launched that day, and about 50 ballots checked for fingerprints, which were inconclusive. The investigation was taken over by the attorney general’s office within days, with investigators collaborating with the sheriff’s deputies to interview voters and others, including Fuentes.
Although Fuentes is charged only with actions that appear on the videotape and involve just a handful of ballots, investigators believe the effort went much farther.
Attorney general’s office investigator William Kluth wrote in one report that there was some evidence suggesting Fuentes actively canvassed San Luis neighborhoods and collected ballots, in some cases paying for them.
Ballot abuse is a felony that carries a possible sentence of up to two years in prison and a $150,000 fine.
Collecting ballots in that manner was a common get-out-the-vote tactic used by both political parties before Arizona passed the 2016 law. Paying for ballots has never been legal.
There’s no sign she or anyone else in Yuma County collected ballots in the general election, but investigators from the attorney general’s office are still active in Yuma County.
The Arizona Republic reported Tuesday that search warrants were served last month at a nonprofit in San Luis. The group’s executive director is chair of the Yuma County board of supervisors and said the warrant sought the cell phone of a San Luis councilwoman who may have been involved in illegal ballot collection.
And at a legislative hearing Tuesday where election conspiracy theorists testified, the Yuma primary election case was again a highlight.
“It’s all about corruption in San Luis and skewing a city council election,” Yuma Republican Rep. Tim Dunn said. “This has been going on for a long time, that you can’t have free and fair elections in south county, for decades. And its spreading across the country.”
Hold on there MAGA election denier. You have zero proof that this isolated incident has gone on for decades. You have zero proof that this isolated incident occurred on a grand scale across the country. You have zero proof that the dozen ballots in question affected the outcome of I presume the Democratic primary race. Even the AG has zero proof that this occurred in the general election because Fuentes had already been reported to the sheriff’s department and was under investigation. So your hyperventilating nonsense is pure unadulterated bullshit.
Phillip Bump of the Washington Post writes, The small-city voter fraud case that doesn’t prove Donald Trump right:
A good way to tell when a news story is getting viral traction is when the ostensibly Congress-focused newspaper The Hill starts promoting it repeatedly. So, four times in the last 12 hours (as of writing), we note that The Hill [a conservative publication which auto-links to Newsmax and Fox News when you use the site] has shared a story about a “coordinated Arizona ballot collection scheme” featuring a mug shot of a glum-looking older woman.
It’s not hard to figure out why this particular story is sparking interest in the moment. We’re less than a month since the premiere of Dinesh D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules” in which he alleges a massive ballot collection scheme in multiple states — including Arizona — that tipped the scales of the 2020 presidential contest. (The film entirely fails to provide credible evidence of this allegation as D’Souza suggested in a conversation with The Post.) D’Souza has repeatedly shared the story at the center of The Hill’s social strategy, arguing that it proves wrong detractors (like myself) who suggested that collecting ballots wasn’t necessarily illegal and, less directly, suggesting that it proves correct his general thesis.
Once again, what D’Souza claims to have isn’t what he suggests. Not only is the incident in Yuma City, Ariz., not evidence of any massive ballot-harvesting effort, and not only does it not prove that any ballot collection is illegal, but it’s also a case that is already included in D’Souza’s film.
At some point before the primary election in Arizona in 2020, a woman named Guillermina Fuentes was videotaped receiving four ballots from voters that were later submitted and counted. This practice of collecting ballots — a tactic at times used by voter-turnout groups to ensure that ballots are actually cast — was made illegal in Arizona under a 2016 law. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (who is now running for the state’s Republican Senate nomination) announced in December 2020 that Fuentes and a woman named Alma Juarez had been indicted on a charge of violating that law. In October 2021, Brnovich announced new charges suggesting that ballots had been altered.
Earlier this week, Fuentes (the woman in the mug shot) pleaded guilty to the ballot-collection charges. The more serious charges added later were dropped. [An important detail left out of the AP report.] The Associated Press reported that investigators believe Fuentes collected more than the handful of ballots she was videotaped with, but also that there was “no sign her illegal ballot collection went beyond the small-town politics Fuentes was involved in.”
This is, in fact, not much to hang a purported national voter-fraud effort on. If anything, it resembles other past small-scale efforts to violate election law, as in local or congressional elections in New Jersey and North Carolina.
Here we point out that Yuma County, Ariz., is also not a great example of how the presidential election might have been tainted by pro-Joe Biden fraud. In 2016, Donald Trump received about 25,000 votes and won the county by just over a percentage point. In 2020, Trump received 45 percent more votes — a bit under 37,000 — and improved to a six-point margin. If Yuma County was riddled with Democratic fraud, it’s hard to sniff out.
Yet Yuma County and its seat, Yuma City, are a subject of fascination for True the Vote, the group that provided D’Souza with the purported evidence of rampant ballot trafficking. At a hearing in Wisconsin in March, True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips claimed that the incidents in Yuma County (which he sort of implied* his group had helped uncover, for which there’s no evidence) had helped trigger their broader investigation. (“We understand that it doesn’t stop here,” he said of the Yuma investigation.)
The film itself includes an interview with a woman whose identity is obscured. She makes broad allegations about a rampant system of collecting fraudulent ballots — again in Yuma County. At a hearing on the purported harvesting scheme before an Arizona legislative committee in May, a True the Vote representative said this person was working with Brnovich’s investigators. She also said that True the Vote had begun focusing on Yuma in “late October 2020,” well after investigators had received the video showing Fuentes collecting ballots that apparently led to her indictment.
What “2000 Mules” has been good at is crystallizing the nebulous concerns many on the right have about the 2020 election around a purportedly data-driven example of electoral malfeasance. The film has given a polished example of something bad seeming to happen — enough, pointedly, to change the election outcome — and has become a sensation as a result. It offers a frame within which Republican officials are now expected to operate.
Once the film was released, the office of the sheriff of Yuma County issued a news release articulating its efforts to combat voter fraud. The sheriff, Leon Wilmot, told reporters he wasn’t investigating fraud in response to the film, but it seems clear that the news release was meant to show action on the subject.
In other words, the available evidence suggests that a local ballot-collection effort of unclear scale was interrupted by state authorities. It’s known that four ballots [the AP reported under a dozen ballots, now it’s only four?] were collected (though not provably altered in any way) during the primary election in 2020. This appears to have then been used repeatedly as a peg for the film itself: that interview with the unnamed person and, abstractly, to validate a claim from Phillips that Fuentes’s arrest prompted ballot harvesters to start wearing gloves when dropping off ballots. (One person in Georgia is shown in the movie wearing gloves when depositing a run-off election ballot during a pandemic.) That Fuentes has pleaded guilty offers no advancement of D’Souza’s transparently thin case.
What D’Souza and his allies seem not to appreciate is that the fact that Fuentes’s ballot collection was detected and prosecuted undercuts the idea that thousands of people were involved in a multistate effort to collect ballots without detection. The argument here is like the argument in defense of Trump’s fraud claims more broadly: No one is investigating this easy-to-prove crime!
And, like Trump’s fraud claims, the reality is the inverse: People are looking very hard and finding very little that’s provably criminal.
The latest Arizona voter fraud case: Arizona woman sentenced for casting ballot of her dead mom:
A southern Arizona woman was sentenced Monday to three years of supervised probation for illegally casting the early ballot of her deceased mother during the November 2020 general election.
State prosecutors said 56-year-old Krista Michelle Conner of Cochise County also had her voter registration revoked and was ordered to pay $890 in fines and surcharges plus complete 100 hours of community service.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office said Conner illegally signed her deceased mother’s early ballot envelope and cast a vote on her behalf.
Note: The Sierra Vista Herald adds: ““The mother was deceased and she (Conner) was not even registered to vote in Cochise County,” Cochise County Recorder David Stevens said.” So why revocation of her voter registration? Did she later register to vote?
Caroline Jeanne Sullivan died on Sept. 7, 2020, according to authorities.
Conner was indicted four months ago and later pleaded guilty to one count of attempted illegal voting in Cochise County Superior Court.
Conner’s is one of just a handful of voter fraud cases from Arizona’s 2020 election that have led to charges, despite the belief of former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters that widespread voter fraud led to his loss in Arizona and other battleground states.
In another Arizona case, a Scottsdale woman was sentenced to probation in April for voting her deceased mother’s ballot in the November 2020 elections.
Also this year, a 70-year-old Lake Havasu City woman was sentenced to one year of supervised probation for voting with her dead father’s name in the 2018 election.