2 more Arizona women charged with harvesting small number of 2020 primary ballots
Oct 20, 2022, 12:00 PM
(Facebook File Photo/Yuma County Clerk and Recorder)
(Facebook File Photo/Yuma County Clerk and Recorder)
PHOENIX – Two southwestern Arizona women were indicted earlier this month for allegedly harvesting a small number of ballots during the 2020 primary election, authorities said Wednesday.
A state grand jury charged Gloria Lopez Torres and Nadia Guadalupe Lizarraga-Mayorquin, aka Nadia Buchanan, with conspiracy and ballot abuse on Oct. 3, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office announced.
Both women are from San Luis, and Torres is a council member in the Yuma County city.
Torres is accused of collecting seven ballots from Lizarraga-Mayorquin, who allegedly collected at least one ballot from another person, according to the indictments.
Early ballots can only be legally collected in Arizona by a voter’s family member, household member or caregiver. Prohibited ballot harvesting is a class 6 felony.
Last week, two other San Luis women were sentenced after previously pleading guilty in ballot harvesting cases.
Guillermina Fuentes, a school board member who was the small border town’s mayor for several years in the 2000s, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and two years’ probation, with the judge saying he did not think she had accepted responsibility for her crime.
Fuentes collected the four completed mail ballots from acquaintances 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. Juarez carried them inside and put them in a ballot drop-off bin.
Juarez pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to 12 months’ probation.
Despite efforts by Republicans who have rallied around the possibility of widespread voting fraud in the 2020 election to paint the Fuentes case as a sign of rampant voting fraud, there’s no sign her illegal ballot collection went beyond the small-town politics she was involved in.
In total, cases involving the four San Luis women involved 12 known ballots for the August 2020 primary election.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
