Arizona prosecutors are requesting a one-year prison sentence for Guillermina Fuentes for her ballot harvesting scheme. That sentence seems very weak considering that 7.2 million Arizona residents received four-year sentences due to fraud. And for most of them, that will be at hard labor. Fuentes is eligible for a maximum sentence of two years for her crime. That tells me that Arizona needs to stiffen its sentences for voter fraud. No less than 5 years, mandatory.
If given one year, Fuentes would only serve eight months unless she gets caught fixing the prison’s vote for Miss Congeniality. In order to prevent voter fraud in the future, the sentence needs to make cheating a bigger risk for Democrats. So few even get prison time that they are not afraid to take the gamble. But, if they are looking at five or ten years, that would be a different story.
Arizona Central reported the details of the case:
Prosecutors were apparently unable to prove the most serious charges, dropping three felony counts alleging that Fuentes filled out one voter’s ballot and forged signatures on some of the four ballots she illegally returned for people who were not family members. [Emphasis added]
Investigators wrote that it appeared Fuentes used her position as a powerful figure in the heavily Mexican-American community to get people to give her or others their ballots to return to the polls. Fuentes and her co-defendant were seen with several mail-in envelopes outside a cultural center in San Luis on the day of the 2020 primary election, the reports show. The ballots were taken inside and dropped in a ballot box. [Emphasis added]
Although Fuentes was charged only with actions that appear on the videotape and involve just a handful of ballots, investigators believe the effort went much farther. Attorney General’s Office Investigator William Kluth wrote in one report that there was some evidence suggesting Fuentes actively canvassed San Luis neighborhoods and collected ballots, in some cases paying for them. [Emphasis added]
Ballot harvesting is illegal in 49 states, with the lone exception being California, of course. In many cases, the votes are harvested in nursing homes where many of the patients are unaware of what is going on around them, let alone in politics. This must end. Let the punishment fit the crime.
