Watch: Illegal Ballot Harvesting Allegedly Caught on Camera in Maricopa County - Report
Video footage of a drop box location in Arizona’s Maricopa County during the 2022 election appears to show numerous people potentially engaging in illegal ballot harvesting.
What’s interesting is that for many of the people captured on camera, the stacks they are placing into the drop box appear to have roughly the same amount of ballots.
Some were captured on video taking pictures of the multiple ballots they were depositing in the drop box.
Also, some of the people wore medical masks in their car, and one man even had a coat hood drawn tight over his head. He pulled a box of ballots out of his trunk.
Another man wore what looked like a bigfoot suit.
According to the time stamp shown on the video, which does match the format of the surveillance footage on the Maricopa County “Live Video Feed,” these instances of what may have been illegal ballot harvesting took place throughout the early voting period and on Election Day itself.
Arizona law permits a family or household member or a caregiver to deliver a ballot on behalf of someone else to a drop box or polling place.
What is odd about many of the instances captured on video is the sheer number of ballots many of the people were delivering. If they were family member or housemate ballots, one would think they would be dropping off two or three ballots, not a stack.
And why take pictures delivering the ballots? I suppose it could be to reassure the voter that their ballot was actually delivered, but again one would expect a smaller number of ballots.
All this is very reminiscent of the surveillance footage featured in Dinesh D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules.”
The central premise of the movie is that an illegal ballot harvesting scheme took place in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin during the 2020 general election.
“Mule” is a term used in the movie for those who repeatedly picked up batches of ballots and placed them in drop boxes.
In the film, an informant from San Luis in Yuma County, whose identity was hidden, detailed how she allegedly participated in the undertaking.
She told True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips, who worked with D’Souza on the documentary, how mules would drop off ballots and come in for what she assumed were weekly payments during the election.
“I would get a call to find out how many ballots were brought in and if they were already pre-filled out first,” the informant said.
She put hundreds of ballots in a drop box herself, the informant told Phillips.
In June, The Associated Press reported that Guillermina Fuentes pleaded guilty to engaging in illegal ballot harvesting during the 2020 primary election in Arizona.
“Fuentes and a second woman were indicted in December 2020 on one count of ballot abuse, a practice commonly known as ‘ballot harvesting’ that was made illegal under a 2016 state law,” the AP reported.
The news service learned through documents obtained from a public records request that investigators were only able to link Fuentes to about a dozen ballots.
However, the report stated, “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,” the AP noted.
KPNX-TV reported, “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.”
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