A parade of character witnesses provided a judge Thursday with glowing reports about a southern Arizona woman who admitted to collecting four early ballots in the 2020 primary election as her lawyer seeks leniency and prosecutors urge him to send her to prison for a year. Testimony in Yuma County Superior Court painted a picture of Guillermina Fuentes as filled with remorse and a pillar of small border community of San Luis.

The 66-year-old mother and grandmother, witnesses said, has spent her life helping others while raising her children, caring for her aging mother and building a business.

Prison or jail time, they said, would hurt the community and serve no purpose.

Fuentes is a school board member and former mayor in San Luis who has pleaded guilty to a felony violation of Arizona's "ballot harvesting" law, which bars anyone but a person's relative, housemate or caregiver from returning ballots for them. Her codefendant, Alma Juarez, pleaded guilty to the same charge, but it was designated as a misdemeanor after she agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

Her agreement calls for a sentence of probation. She carried four ballots Fuentes gave her into a polling place and dropped them off.

Republicans have seized on the case as a sign of widespread voting fraud, but it is the only "ballot harvesting" case ever prosecuted under Arizona's 2016 law banning the practice, and fewer than a dozen cases from the 2020 election have been filed in a state where more than 3.1 million votes were cast. ...

(So, republicans want to put grandmothers in jail for helping people return their ballots? ...)