Arizona now joins 18 other states in maintaining a secure chain of custody between the voter and the ballot box, Tweeted Arizona Governor Doug Ducey after signing HB2023, sponsored by Rep. Michelle Ugenti-Rita. The bill was sought primarily by community activists who had witnessed abuses of the mail-in ballot voting process.
This year, community activist Sergio Arellano told lawmakers of residents of southern Arizona who had been asked to turn ballots over to complete strangers who claimed to be with the County Recorder’s Office.
Last year, a video obtained of a ballot harvester by former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party, AJ LaFaro, shattered the narrative that ballot harvesting did not exist. That video show a man from the left-leaning Citizens for a Better Arizona stuffing a ballot box with hundreds of ballots.
LaFaro’s video was the equivalent of a Yeti sighting, according to politicos. For years, Democrats have claimed that ballot harvesters did not exist, or if they did exist, they only harvested handfuls of ballots. LaFaro’s video clearly busted that myth, and the ballot harvester featured in that video, Ben Marin, became known as the Yeti; the wild man-like mythological creature that some claim to have seen in the Himalayas.
“I want to thank Governor Ducey for acting so quickly and decisively in signing Arizona HB2023 into law,” said LaFaro in a statement released Wednesday. “I am pleased the egregious activity of ballot harvesting is finally a serious crime here in Arizona. It took three years of hard work, constant attacks from the progressive socialists and the liberal Democrats and a frivolous lawsuit against me that was ultimately dismissed.”
LaFaro was sued by Marin for defamation after he made the video public. That lawsuit failed.
With the 2016 election on the horizon all across the United States, Arizona legislators heard compelling testimony from community leaders last week as to why the state should is looking to join the majority of states and end the practice of ballot harvesting. At a hearing of the Arizona House Elections Committee on HB2023 lawmakers heard firsthand accounts of the oppressive practices of political machines that prey primarily on lower income neighborhoods through ballot harvesting.
Under HB2023 ballot harvesting will be a class six felony.
Rep. Bob Thorpe stated, “After years of hard fought struggle, and with the help of sympathetic Republican congressmen, the 19th Amendment was enacted 94 years ago, finally giving women the cherished right to vote. The amendment reads ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.’ However, in the 21st century, Democratic activists are denying women and others of their sacred right to vote through the immoral practice of ballot harvesting. The scam goes like this: a person will knock on a door and deceive a early-ballot voter by stating that they are an election official. They collect the early ballots from the unsuspecting voters, ballots that should have been simply mailed back, and then they throw the ballots from the other party into a trashcan. Through deception and dishonest cheating, once again women and others are shamefully denied their right to vote.”
Arellano, a southern Arizona native and community leader, stunned lawmakers when he spoke about the abuses of mostly minority voters by political operatives. Arellano, a first-generation American and wounded warrior, told lawmakers, “I still continue to live and die in fight for these people every single day because they’re being oppressed and lied to by people from the Democratic Party; unfortunately because those are the operatives out picking up ballots.”
“Just recently, astute citizens noticed how easy it is to learn how sealed ballots were voted, without opening them, by merely holding them in front of a light source. This proved beyond any doubt the lack of security of ballots that are surrendered to people other than election or postal service personnel,” stated legislative expert Jose Borrajero. “The ensuing flood of calls to legislators probably had some impact on their speedy approval of HB2023.”
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