As the Arizona Senate and its hired auditors continue to look at how Maricopa County handled the 2020 General Election, some unrelated election investigations are moving to courtroom.
Next month Tracey Kay McKee of Scottsdale is slated to be at Maricopa County Superior Court where she stands charge with two felonies related to an attempt to cast an early ballot belonging to a deceased voter. She is being prosecuted by the office of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
McKee is the daughter of the voter who died Oct. 5, two days before the early voting period began. There would not have been time to stop the mailing of the voter’s early ballot, according to county election officials. However, McKee allegedly signed her mother’s name on an affidavit under penalty of perjury.
The Scottsdale woman may not be the only one charged with voting a dead person’s ballot in last November’s election.
Arizona Daily Independent has learned that Cochise County Recorder David Stevens contacted the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) election integrity unit about two “dead voter ballots” he discovered during the general election. Like McKee’s mother, both voters were on the early-ballot mailing list but died shortly before the ballots were mailed out.
Someone then affixed the purported signature of each registered voter on the affidavit section of the envelope which contained the ballot, and attempted to cast the ballots. The two deceased voters lived in different part of Cochise County.
The ballots were turned over to the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office on Nov. 5 but the investigation ended a month later when a detective was unable to make contact with anyone at either voter’s residence. Several voters in Cochise County have demanded a more in-depth investigation into who had access to the ballots and whether it is possible to obtain usable fingerprints from the affidavit envelopes.
It may also be possible to open the sealed affidavit envelope to seek fingerprint evidence from the ballot. Doing so, however, would likely require the AGO to obtain a court order.
Brnovich’s office would not discuss its conversations with Stevens nor provide an estimate as to how long an investigation may take.
In the meantime, two women indicted by a state grand jury earlier this year for felony charges of ballot harvesting have been ordered to appear in a Yuma County courtroom on Aug. 12 for a pretrial hearing.
Guillermina Fuentes and Alma Yadira Juarez are each charged with one Class 6 felony of ballot abuse for allegedly collecting four ballots during the August 2020 Primary Election which were processed and counted by the Yuma County Recorder. Fuentes is a member of the Gadsden Elementary School District board in San Luis.
Those cases are also being prosecuted by the AGO’s election integrity unit.
Additional election misconduct prosecutions could be possible, but Brnovich is waiting on Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs to provide a report that is overdue for the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.
According to Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright, Hobbs had not provided a required notification of possible double-state voting. Elections officials have told Arizona Daily Independent it is highly unlikely that not one of the 3 million voters who cast ballots in 2020 did not vote in any other state.
“Notably, this is the first time in over a decade the AGO has received no referrals from the Secretary of State regarding double voting,” Wright wrote to Hobbs in a July 14 email.
In the same email, Wright requested Hobbs provide “any and all records your office possesses” related to the Secretary of State’s call for Brnovich to investigate alleged efforts by AZGOP chair Kelli Ward and then-President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to pressure Maricopa County officials to stop counting ballots in the days after Nov. 3.
Questions have also been raised about whether Ward or Giuliani sought to delay the certification of Arizona’s official election results. It has been reported that Hobbs was intending last Friday to send the records she obtained related to Ward and Giuliani to the AGO.
Getting convictions for election-related crimes is not common. In 2019, the State of Arizona successfully prosecuted two men related to voter misconduct.
Richard John Greenfield, then 80, was sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to a felony charge of voting twice in the 2016 General Election, once in Pima County and once in Washoe County, Nevada. He was ordered to pay of fine of $2,500 and serve at least 100 hours of community service.
Also placed on probation for voting in both counties was Randy Allen Jumper, then 62. Jumper also had to pay a $5,000 fine.
The Attorney General’s Office investigation Greenfield and Jumper after receiving a prospective double-state 2016 voting notification from the Secretary of State’s Office in 2018.