Court sentences former Democrat Mayor of Arizona to jail term for election crime

An Arizona court in the US has sentenced a former  Mayor, Guillermina Fuentes, to 30 days imprisonment om charges of election crimes.

The presiding judge had sentenced the former Democratic mayor Guillermina Fuentes to 30 days in prison for ballot harvesting during the August 2020 primary election.

It was gathered that “Fuentes this week received a 30-day sentence for that crime, as well as two years’ worth of probation.”

The charges include: “Fuentes collected the four completed mail ballots from acquaintances in the city of San Luis and gave them to co-defendant, Alma Juarez, while working a table outside a polling place where she was urging people to vote for a slate of city council candidates/”

Furthermore, “Juarez carried them inside and put them in a ballot drop-off bin. Election officials in Yuma County confirmed that the ballots were legitimate and the mail-ballot envelopes were signed by qualified voters, so they were counted.”

The prosecutors were said to have dropped some charges, which perhaps, reduced the prisons sentence.

It was highlighted that the “Prosecutors alleged in court papers 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 defendants pleaded guilty to a single count of ballot abuse. [Judge Roger Nelson] noted the small-town politics in the case and years of rumors that people like Fuentes collected ballots from voters and delivered them to the polls.”

It was gathered that the Public Interest Legal Foundation complained about mail ballots and their possible fraud. About 15 million mail ballots were said to be unaccounted for in 2021, about one year, after the 2020 US presidential election.