An Arizona woman has pleaded guilty to using her position in the Democratic Party to illegally harvest ballots in a ballot abuse scheme.
Guillermina Fuentes, the 66-year-old former mayor of San Luis, Arizona, pleaded guilty on June 2 to one count of ballot abuse for her role in an August 2020 primary election ballot harvesting scheme, according to the Arizona Attorney General’s office. Arizona attorney general’s office investigators said the operation was “sophisticated,” reported The Associated Press.
The scheme involved early ballots from other voters that were collected and deposited into a ballot box on primary election day, the office said.
Fuentes’s plea came as a result of an ongoing election fraud investigation conducted by the Arizona Attorney General office’s Election Integrity Unit. She was indicted in December 2020.
Fuentes, of Yuma County, is the owner of a local construction business, former mayor of San Luis, Arizona, and a Democratic precinct committee person.
She admitted to “knowingly” collecting early ballots from four persons who is not her family member, household member, or caretaker, or on or about Aug. 4, 2020, the day of the primary election, according to her plea agreement.
Fuentes further admitted that the early ballots were later provided to Alma Juarez, who pleaded guilty in January to one count of ballot abuse, a misdemeanor with a maximum sentence of six months with probation available, according to Juarez’s plea agreement.
The former mayor will be sentenced on June 30.
Fuentes told The Epoch Times on Friday that the charge was a result of “political witchcraft” and that her political opponents “hated” her.
In a response to a press inquiry from The Epoch Times, Fuente’s attorney called Arizona’s ballot abuse law a race-based “ongoing anti-democratic, state-wide, and national voter suppression efforts.”
Parallel Investigations
Tania Pavlak, a spokesperson from the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office, told The Epoch Times that the Sheriff’s office has not been involved in prosecuting Fuentes, as the Arizona Attorney General’s office and the county sheriff’s office are conducting separate and parallel investigations on voting fraud allegations in the state.
By Gary Bai
Read Full Article on TheEpochTimes.com
Facts Matter (June 6): 2 Days After ‘2000 Mules’ Presentation, Former Mayor Pleads Guilty to Ballot Harvesting in AZ
A woman in Arizona officially pled guilty to using her position within the Democratic Party to illegally harvest ballots in what was described by the attorney general’s office as a “sophisticated” ballot harvesting scheme.
This guilty plea came right on the heels of two separate events:
The first is a ballot fraud investigation launched by the Yuma County Sheriffs office. The second was a presentation given by the researchers behind the film “2000 Mules” to the Arizona state legislature. And during that presentation, they presented evidence of the cell phone tracking data they were able to combine, showing how more than 200 individual devices visited the ballot drop boxes in two of the state’s largest counties—no less than 5,700 times during the 2020 election.
