An Arizona woman has pleaded guilty to using her position in the Democratic Party to illegally harvest ballots in a ballot abuse scheme.

Guillermina Fuentes, the 66-year-old former mayor of San Luis, Arizona, pleaded guilty on June 2 to one count of ballot abuse for her role in an August 2020 primary election ballot harvesting scheme, according to the Arizona Attorney General’s office. Arizona attorney general’s office investigators said the operation was “sophisticated,” reported The Associated Press.

The scheme involved early ballots from other voters that were collected and deposited into a ballot box on primary election day, the office said.

Fuentes’s plea came as a result of an ongoing election fraud investigation conducted by the Arizona Attorney General office’s Election Integrity Unit. She was indicted in December 2020.

Fuentes, of Yuma County, is the owner of a local construction business, former mayor of San Luis, Arizona, and a Democratic precinct committee person.

She admitted to “knowingly” collecting early ballots from four persons who is not her family member, household member, or caretaker, or on or about Aug. 4, 2020, the day of the primary election, according to her plea agreement.

Fuentes further admitted that the early ballots were later provided to Alma Juarez, who pleaded guilty in January to one count of ballot abuse, a misdemeanor with a maximum sentence of six months with probation available, according to Juarez’s plea agreement.

The former mayor will be sentenced on June 30.

Fuentes told The Epoch Times on Friday that the charge was a result of “political witchcraft” and that her political opponents “hated” her.

In a response to a press inquiry from The Epoch Times, Fuente’s attorney called Arizona’s ballot abuse law a race-based “ongoing anti-democratic, state-wide, and national voter suppression efforts.”

Parallel Investigations

Tania Pavlak, a spokesperson from the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office, told The Epoch Times that the Sheriff’s office has not been involved in prosecuting Fuentes, as the Arizona Attorney General’s office and the county sheriff’s office are conducting separate and parallel investigations on voting fraud allegations in the state.

Pavlak said the sheriff’s office is conducting its own voter fraud investigation and currently has 16 open cases related to either the 2020 election or the 2022 primaries. She declined to comment on how many cases are related to either election.

The “pattern of fraudulent voter registration forms,” according to a May 11 statement made by the sheriff’s office, include impersonation fraud, false registrations, duplicate voting, and fraudulent use of absentee ballots.

The spokesperson said the Yuma County Recorder’s Office detected a pattern of fraudulent voter registration, in which a number of people sent in duplicate forms or documents with false information on them, and referred the cases to the county’s sheriff.

“We already had been investigating these cases for the past few months and so the sheriff wanted to make sure we sent out that information with election season now hot and up and running. That way, people were aware of what was happening and also could stay vigilant,” Pavlak said.

“What they’re seeing is that there are registration forms that are being either falsified or people that are double registering with information that doesn’t match their current registration,” she added.

Ballot Harvesting Hearing

Fuentes’s guilty plea came two days after a hearing at the Arizona legislature where the state’s Senate and House lawmakers heard evidence and allegations pertaining to a state-wide ballot harvesting campaign during the 2020 presidential election.

Election integrity organization “True the Vote” at the hearing presented evidence of cell phone tracking data showing that more than 200 devices had visited ballot drop boxes in two of the state’s largest counties no less than 5,700 times during the 2020 election.

“When we started the project, we didn’t know [what we would find],” said Catherine Engelbrecht, the Texas group’s founder and president, at the May 31 hearing.

“We began to think through what is a realistic expectation or threshold for when going to a drop box is too many times. We wanted to focus on a clear, narrow data set [to demonstrate] extreme outlier behavior.”

The group’s investigators settled on 10 visits as outlier behavior—but in Arizona, they found that each alleged ballot harvestor went an average of 21 times each, Engelbrecht said.

In Yuma County, the study found 1,435 unique drop box visits by 41 target devices based on cell phone signals, or “pings.”

Lawmakers—all Republican—vowed to move forward with bill HB-2289 that would make ballot drop boxes illegal in Arizona.

“The only thing I would like to see come out of this meeting is people going to jail,” said State Rep. Quang Nguyen (R). “I would just like to see people cuffed.”

Engelbrecht told The Epoch Times on June 3 that the state attorney general’s investigation, which led to the indictments of Fuentes and Juarez, shows that this issue is “getting a broader look.”

“Based on our research, the ‘Arizona model’ is one that is followed across the country, and it involves national organizations,” she said, referring to alleged widespread ballot harvesting.

“So we, the American people, need to continue the pressure on to continue investigations moving forward to get to the bottom of what’s happening, not just in Yuma County, Arizona, but in many counties across this country.”

Zachary Stieber and Allan Stein contributed to this report.

Gary Bai

Gary Bai is a reporter for Epoch Times Canada, covering China and U.S. news.

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The first of three peer-reviewed research studies on women who suffered menstrual irregularities or a decidual cast around the time COVID vaccines were rolled out begins to shed light on the sudden spike of this historically rare gynecological abnormality.

A decidual cast is when the inside lining of the uterus (endometrium) is shed intact, the entire lining is shed in one piece.

“What a decidual cast is is the sloughing off of the entire inside of the uterus all at once, generally preceded by several days of intense cramping as the uterus contracts. So what is passed is a ‘cast’ of the inside of the uterus,” Dr. Christiane Northrup, a co-author of the study, told The Epoch Times.

Over the past 109 years, decidual cast shedding (DCS) had less than 40 reported cases in the medical literature. The event had been so rare that there are only case studies and population prevalence data doesn’t exist, according to the research.

In the later 7.5 months of 2021, participants of MyCycleStory.com reported 292 cases out of 6,049 women who participated in the survey.

One of the authors of the study, Dr. James Thorp, is an extensively published 68-year-old physician MD board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology, as well as maternal-fetal medicine, who has been practicing obstetrics for over 42 years.

“The most common causes of DCS in pre-pandemic years include spontaneous miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and prolonged progesterone therapy. We speculate that one potential mechanism could include the hypercoagulable state and change in the blood consistency that has been well documented by many embalmers including Mr. Richard Hirschman. Thus, the large, durable post-mortem clots that the embalmers first noticed last year can be viewed in this context as ‘arterial casts’ and ‘venous casts’ and they do have a strikingly similar appearance to that of decidual casts, excluding the shape,” Thorp said.

“Extreme menstrual irregularities such as DCS should not be ignored as there are potentially important implications with regard to the lipid nanoparticles that are known to concentrate in the ovaries and also syncytial antibodies that could result in miscarriage (spontaneous abortions),” he added.

Thorp previously told The Epoch Times that he has been seeing “many, many, many complications in pregnant women, in moms and in fetuses, in children, offspring,” since the COVID vaccine was widely distributed.

“Fetal death, miscarriage, death of the fetus inside the mom,” Thorp added. “What I’ve seen in the last two years is unprecedented.”

Thorp explained that although he has seen an increase in fetal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes associated with the COVID-19 vaccination, attempts to quantify this effect are hampered by the imposition of gag orders on physicians and nurses that were imposed in September 2021, as reviewed in the publication “Patient Betrayal: The Corruption of Healthcare, Informed Consent and the Physician-Patient Relationship” (pdf).

The study, titled “COVID-19 and the surge in Decidual Cast Shedding” (pdf), shows disturbing images from different women who suffered DCS.

It reads: “A decidual cast may occur when the cessation of progesterone levels results in loss of support for the decidualized endometrial lining. This results in a synchronized detachment of the entire decidualized layer of endometrium, and it passes from the uterus through the cervix and vagina. This tissue mass/clot is often triangular, consistent with the internal shape of the intrauterine cavity. Other less common causes of DCS include cessation of exogenous estrogen/ progesterone therapies, and use of oral contraceptives and injectable progesterone.”

Tiffany Parotto, the lead researcher of the study and founder of MyCycleStory, is particularly distressed about the censorship and deletion of a Facebook group of about 21,000 members where women were talking about their menstrual irregularities.

“The real problem I’m seeing here is that it’s 2022 and somehow still acceptable for the voices of women to be completely erased as if they don’t matter,” Parotto told The Epoch Times.

“The fact of the matter is, tens of thousands of women are experiencing traumatic bleeding and major issues. Women know what is normal for us and what is not. We know our bodies more than any doctor or social media site to know when something isn’t right. What right does big tech have to tell us our stories are not worth sharing? How are we supposed to get to the root of what the cause could be if we are left feeling like we are the only ones experiencing them? I’m disgusted at the idea that our experiences are being suppressed and undermined as if suddenly ‘listen to women’ only means sometimes. So we knew we had to do the work ourselves and created the study. We had to give these women their voices back and let them know that we refuse to allow them to be silenced and we will do what needs to be done to demand attention on this issue,” Parotto said.

Northrup, MD, a former fellow in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, fears that there could be much more data related to reproductive damage that hasn’t been discovered yet.

“The female menstrual cycle is considered a vital sign as important as blood pressure and body temperature when it comes to health assessment. Our initial findings of bleeding and decidual cast shedding in women who have been exposed to those who have had the experimental injection suggest that what we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg. The reproductive effects of this shot could be far worse than we’ve been led to believe,” Northrup said.

The authors point out that there are some limitations to this first study.

“First, it is an observational study of patient questionnaires and certainly subject to sample bias. Second, the decidual casts were not confirmed by pathological analysis but self-reported. Third, the pre- and post- pandemic prevalence of DCS cannot be accurately determined at the time of this writing,” they state.

Enrico Trigoso

REPORTER

Enrico Trigoso is an Epoch Times reporter focusing on the NYC area.

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