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A former Democratic mayor In Arizona who is said to have been a pillar in her community has now been sentenced after becoming the first person convicted on ballot harvesting charges in the state under a law passed in 2016.
According to reports, Guillermina Fuentes, 66, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and two years probation on Thursday after a local judge tossed out her plea for leniency, saying he did not believe she was contrite about her crime and had not yet fully accepted responsibility for what she did.
The case of Fuentes, who is a school board member and former mayor of the small border town of San Luis, caught the attention of authorities during the August 2020 primary “and eventually led to charges against Fuentes and another San Luis woman,” The Associated Press reported. She pleaded guilty to collecting four early voting ballots in the primary.
In a separate report, the AP added that she “has pleaded guilty to a felony violation of Arizona’s ‘ballot harvesting’ law, which bars anyone but a person’s relative, housemate or caregiver from returning ballots for them. Her codefendant, Alma Juarez, pleaded guilty to the same charge, but it was designated as a misdemeanor after she agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.”
Assistant Attorney General Todd Lawson was seeking a year behind bars for Fuentes, arguing before Judge Roger Nelson that the case is about ensuring safe and fair elections under the law. Hers is the first case prosecuted under the 2016 law, which was upheld last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, the AP added.
“Nelson told Fuentes that despite a parade of character witnesses and a probation officer who wrote a pre-sentence report saying in court last week that she was remorseful, Nelson said he didn’t believe it, and then quoted from the report,” the AP noted further.
During her sentencing, Nelson said: “The defendant acknowledged responsibility for carrying ballots for someone else. However, she stated, ‘I’m not a criminal.’ Well, you are a criminal. You committed a criminal offense. I don’t think you recognize that as a criminal offense. That’s the problem that I have.”
The judge went on to acknowledge that several character witnesses from the community spoke in defense of Fuentes as her attorneys argued for a sentence of just probation. However, the judge said that also played a big role in his decision to put her behind bars.
“Many of the things that were put forward as mitigating factors, I think they’re also aggravating factors,” he said. “You have been a leader in the San Luis community for a long time. People look up to you, people respect you, and they look to what you do.”
The AP added:
Fuentes collected the four early voting ballots from acquaintances in San Luis and gave them to co-defendant Alma Juarez while working at a table outside a polling place where she was urging people to vote for a slate of city council candidates. Juarez carried them inside and put them in a ballot drop-off bin.
A city council write-in candidate videotaped the exchange outside the polls and called the sheriff’s office. The attorney general’s election integrity unit quickly took over the investigation.
“It’s been an issue for a long time, or at least it’s been alleged that it’s an issue, that people vote for others, take their ballots,” Nelson said. “Everybody that’s involved in politics in this area knew that a new law was passed. You certainly knew it, that that law was new, even went up to the Supreme Court.”
With weeks before the crucial primaries in Arizona earlier this year, election officials admitted they made a “mistake” with ballots.
As noted by Yahoo News, over 60,000 Pinal County voters received early voting ballots with mistakes, and county officials told local news stations that they do not have a clear solution of when they will correct the issues.
Pinal County elections director David Frisk took full responsibility for the mistake. “This was not a system glitch or a computer error or anything nefarious. It was no fault of anyone in the recorder’s office; it’s my mistake,” Frisk said at the time.
