Arizona Woman Pleads Guilty to ‘Sophisticated’ Ballot Harvesting Scheme

An Arizona woman has pleaded guilty to using her position in the Democratic Party to illegally harvest ballots in a ballot abuse scheme.

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.

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.

Pavlak said the sheriff’s office is conducting its own voter fraud investigation and currently has 16 open cases related to either the 2020 election or the 2022 primaries. She declined to comment on how many cases are related to either election.

The spokesperson said the Yuma County Recorder’s Office detected a pattern of fraudulent voter registration, in which a number of people sent in duplicate forms or documents with false information on them, and referred the cases to the county’s sheriff.

“We already had been investigating these cases for the past few months and so the sheriff wanted to make sure we sent out that information with election season now hot and up and running. That way, people were aware of what was happening and also could stay vigilant,” Pavlak said.

Election integrity organization “True the Vote” at the hearing presented evidence of cell phone tracking data showing that more than 200 devices had visited ballot drop boxes in two of the state’s largest counties no less than 5,700 times during the 2020 election.

“When we started the project, we didn’t know [what we would find],” said Catherine Engelbrecht, the Texas group’s founder and president, at the May 31 hearing.

“We began to think through what is a realistic expectation or threshold for when going to a drop box is too many times. We wanted to focus on a clear, narrow data set [to demonstrate] extreme outlier behavior.”

The group’s investigators settled on 10 visits as outlier behavior—but in Arizona, they found that each alleged ballot harvestor went an average of 21 times each, Engelbrecht said.

In Yuma County, the study found 1,435 unique drop box visits by 41 target devices based on cell phone signals, or “pings.”

Lawmakers—all Republican—vowed to move forward with bill HB-2289 that would make ballot drop boxes illegal in Arizona.

“The only thing I would like to see come out of this meeting is people going to jail,” said State Rep. Quang Nguyen (R). “I would just like to see people cuffed.”

Engelbrecht told The Epoch Times on June 3 that the state attorney general’s investigation, which led to the indictments of Fuentes and Juarez, shows that this issue is “getting a broader look.”

“Based on our research, the ‘Arizona model’ is one that is followed across the country, and it involves national organizations,” she said, referring to alleged widespread ballot harvesting.

“So we, the American people, need to continue the pressure on to continue investigations moving forward to get to the bottom of what’s happening, not just in Yuma County, Arizona, but in many counties across this country.”