A voter integrity organization will present information about ballot harvesting in the 2020 election to a group of Republican lawmakers next week.
“On Tuesday, May 31, True the Vote will host a presentation for Arizona State Senate and House Members relating to findings of ballot harvesting that occurred in both Maricopa and Yuma Counties during the 2020 General Election,” the Arizona State Senate Republican Caucus said in a Friday press release.
State Senator Kelly Townsend (R-Apache Junction) is leading the charge.
A spokesperson for the State Senate Republicans did not return a Friday comment request.
True the Vote has existed since 2009 but has been particularly active since the 2020 election cycle, the results of which former President Donald Trump hotly contested.
“In 2009, True the Vote found its footing after we realized that we were at a crossroads, as a nation, to keep elections free and fair,” that group’s website says. “After being told we were ‘playing at the margins’ and that ‘process doesn’t matter,’ we learned instead that process is key, and citizens are far more powerful than we really know.”
One of those key processes in particular – transporting absentee ballots to ballot boxes, and from ballot boxes to vote counters – has been called into question since the 2020 election.
A recent film by Dinesh D’Souza called “2000 Mules” featured True the Vote, which has focused on ballot harvesting in Arizona.
The film and the group believe that hundreds of thousands of ballots were transported from the offices of left-wing nonprofits to unmonitored ballot drop boxes in Arizona.
Some cases of ballot harvesting are already being prosecuted, The Arizona Sun Times reported.
“Last year, [Arizona Attorney General Mark] Brnovich’s office prosecuted Guillermina Fuentes, who was a previous mayor of San Luis, a Democratic precinct committee person, and a member of the Gadsden Elementary School Board,” The Sun Times reported earlier this month. “A grand jury indicted her in December on one count of ballot abuse, also known as ballot harvesting, for collecting four ballots from people and turning them in. She has a change of plea hearing scheduled for June 2.”
Legally required chain-of-custody documents, thousands of which remain outstanding in Georgia, have also called into question the integrity of the absentee voting process.
Georgia was another unexpected swing state that voted in favor of President Joe Biden by a small margin in 2020.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Arizona State Capitol” by Wars. CC BY-SA 3.0.
