A parade of character witnesses provided a judge Thursday with glowing accounts of a southern Arizona woman who admitted to collecting four early votes in the 2020 primary election as her attorney pleads for leniency and prosecutors urge her to send – her in prison for a year. Testimony in Yuma County Superior Court painted a picture Guillermina Fuentes as full of remorse and a pillar of the small border community of San Luis.
According to witnesses, the 66-year-old mother and grandmother spent her life helping others while raising her children, caring for her aging mother and building a business.
Jail or prison, they said, would harm the community and serve no purpose.
Fuentes is a school board member and former mayor of San Luis who has pleaded guilty to a felony violation of Arizona law.”collection of ballots“, the law, which prohibits anyone who is not a person’s family member, housemate or caregiver from returning ballots for them. His co-defendant, Alma Juárez, pleaded guilty to the same charge, but was designated as to a misdemeanor after she agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
His plea deal calls for a sentence of probation. He took four ballots that Fuentes gave him to a polling station and left them.
Republicans have seized on the case as a sign of expansion vote fraudbut it is the only “vote-rigging” case ever prosecuted under Arizona’s 2016 law banning the practice, and fewer than a dozen cases from the 2020 election have been filed in a state where more than 3.1 million votes were cast.
Arizona Attorney General’s Office via AP
In states where the practice is legal, volunteers or campaign workers can go directly to voters’ homes, pick up completed ballots and drop them off en masse at polling places or polling offices. In some states, ballot collectors may be paid by the hour for their work collecting ballots.
Sherri Castillo, a defense mitigation expert who interviewed Fuentes and others in the community, told the court Thursday that his community involvement and volunteer work are difficult to adequately describe.
“She embarrasses me, I can tell you that,” Castillo said. “I have never met anyone who gives back to the community more than Ms. Fuentes.”
“Not being Ms. Fuentes in the community would be a detriment to the community,” he added.
Others who testified before Judge Roger Nelson included the county probation officer who recommended no jail time in his report, a Yuma County supervisor and former state senator who has known Fuentes for years and a retired San Luis police officer who has known her since 1971, when they were both growing up in the then-small border community, and now serves with her on a local school board.
“I think in our community a lot of us value her,” said retired police officer Luis Marquez.
Assistant Attorney General Todd Lawson is asking for a year in prison for Fuentes, telling Nelson the case is about election security and Arizona’s 2016 law banning “ballot harvesting.” This is the first prosecution under this law, which was maintained by the US Supreme Court last year.
He said that while Fuentes and Juárez were caught on video by a political rival outside a polling station examining four ballots cast, the question remains what they were doing.
“The question is, why does (Fuentes) feel the need to put pressure on people in his community and control the flow of their ballots to the polls,” Lawson told the judge. “This is the issue of public integrity here.”
Prosecutors alleged in court documents that Fuentes ran a sophisticated operation using her status in Democratic politics in San Luis to persuade voters to let her gather and, in some cases, fill out their ballots. But they dropped more serious charges of conspiracy and forgery and both pleaded guilty to a single count of vote-rigging.
A defense expert who investigated election law cases in Arizona testified that no one with a clean record has ever been sentenced to prison or jail in the past 20 years. Anne Chapman, Fuentes’ attorney, told Nelson that doing so would be a miscarriage of justice.
“She pled guilty to electoral fraud, meaning delivering four legally voted and signature-verified ballots,” Chapman said. “The rest of the allegations against Ms. Fuentes are false, unfounded, unproven and largely made up by political opponents who denied the elections who have a political ax to grind.”
Nelson’s court assistant previously told attorneys in the case in an email that he intended to “give them 30 days in jail.” He set sentencing for both women next week.
- In:
- Arizona
- Election
- elections
- crime
- collection of ballots
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