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| Photo Credit: AP. |
PHOENIX (AP) — A parade of character witnesses provided a judge Thursday with glowing reports about a southern Arizona woman who admitted collecting four voted early ballots in the 2020 primary election, as her lawyer seeks leniency and prosecutors urge him to send her to prison for a year.
Testimony in
Yuma County Superior Court painted a picture of Guillermina Fuentes as filled
with remorse and a pillar of small border community of San Luis. The
66-year-old mother and grandmother, witnesses said, has spent her life helping
others while raising her children, caring for her aging mother and building a
business.
Prison or
jail time, they said, would hurt the community and serve no purpose.
Fuentes is a
school board member and former mayor in San Luis who 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.
Her
agreement calls for a sentence of probation. She carried four ballots Fuentes
gave her into a polling place and dropped them off.
Republicans
have seized on the case as a sign of widespread voting fraud, but it is the
only “ballot harvesting” 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.
Sherri
Castillo, a defense mitigation expert who interviewed Fuentes and others in the
community, told the court Thursday that her community involvement and volunteer
work are hard to adequately describe.
“She puts me
to shame, I can tell you that,” Castillo said. “I’ve never come across someone
who gives back more to the community than Ms. Fuentes does.”
“Ms. Fuentes
not being in the community would be a detriment to the community,” she added.
Others who
testified before Judge Roger Nelson included the county probation officer who
recommended no jail time in her 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 both were growing up in the then-tiny
border community and serves with her now on a local school board.
“I think
that in our community a lot of us look up to her,” retired police officer Luis
Marquez said.
Assistant
Attorney General Todd Lawson is seeking a year in prison for Fuentes, telling
Nelson that the case is about the security of elections and the 2016 Arizona
law barring so-called “ballot harvesting.” This is the first prosecution under
that law, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Cour t last year.
He said that
while Fuentes and Juarez were captured on video by a political rival outside a
vote center examining four voted ballots, the question remains what they were
doing.
“The
question is, why does (Fuentes) feel the need to exert pressure over people in
her community and control the flow of their ballot to the ballot box,” Lawson
told the judge. “That’s the issue of public integrity here.”
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 pleaded guilty to a single count of
ballot abuse.
A defense
expert who researched election law cases in Arizona testified that no one with
a clean record has ever been sentenced to jail or prison in the past 20 years.
Anne Chapman, Fuentes’ lawyer, told Nelson that doing so would be a miscarriage
of justice.
“She entered
a plea of guilty to ballot abuse — that is, delivering four lawfully voted,
signature-verified ballots,” Chapman said. “The rest of the allegations against
Ms. Fuentes are untrue, unfounded, untested and largely made-up by
election-denying political opponents who have a political ax to grind.”
Nelson’s
court assistant previously told attorneys in the case in an email that he
intends “to give them 30 days in jail.” He set sentencing for both women for
next week.