One of America’s most notable election fraud whistleblowers may be on the path to victory for the Republican primary for the Yuma County recorder’s race. But first, there will be a recount.
As of Tuesday afternoon, after the county reported that all ballots have been processed, advocate and Yuma Union High School District board member David Lara was leading incumbent Richard Colwell by less than 50 votes: 6,023 votes to 5,976 votes, or nearly 12,000 ballots exactly.
Colwell was appointed to the recorder’s office in 2022 to fulfill the remainder of Robyn Stallworth Pouquette’s term. Yuma County is unique in that its recorder’s office directly oversees elections, unlike other counties in the state in which their boards of supervisors oversee elections while their recorders oversee voter registrations.
On Monday, Lara posted a hopeful declaration of victory onto Facebook.
“It’s not official yet but it looks like I won it,” said Lara.
The totals will have to be vetted by an automatic recount, however, before Lara may officially be declared the victor.
Voter turnout was just over 20 percent, with nearly 22,000 ballots cast out of over 106,300 registered voters. The highest turnouts were in precincts 27 (45 percent), 26 (38 percent), and 5 (36 percent).
Colwell led in 18 precincts; Lara led in 23 precincts. Colwell and Lara were tied for two precincts. No reporting was made available for four precincts.
It was Lara and another Yuma County man, Gary Garcia Snyder, who exposed a San Luis ballot harvesting scheme in the 2020 election by now-Vice Mayor Gloria Torres, who was convicted of the crime last year following a two-year long investigation by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and Yuma County Sheriff’s Office. Lara and Snyder procured hidden video surveillance outside a San Luis polling station in July 2020.
Former San Luis Mayor Guillermina Fuentes and a local, Alma Yadira Juarez, were also convicted on the ballot harvesting based on the video evidence, but in 2022.
The ballot harvesting scheme was part of a longstanding practice of buying and selling ballots in San Luis’s seedy political underbelly, per public records obtained from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
The 2020 election wasn’t the first time Lara raised concerns about election fraud, not by years. Lara began going public about illegal ballot activity in the area beginning in 2010.
Colwell has defended Yuma County’s elections, most recently in an interview with KAWC.
“I learned real quick when I started working in this office that they’re the most honest, hard-working people, they’re not trying to manipulate the outcome of the election, they’re just doing their job and doing the best they can. And, unfortunately, over the past five or six years, they’ve been subject to scrutiny and unwarranted criticism that they don’t deserve, because they’re not fixing votes ,they’re not manipulating outcomes, they’re doing the same thing they’ve been doing for years.”
Lara also gave a brief address at the RNC Convention last month, but he didn’t discuss election integrity at all. Instead, Lara focused his speech on the border crisis ushered in by the Biden administration, and its effects on his hometown of San Luis.
The likely turnover of the Yuma County Recorder’s Office would be among the several that have occurred in this election over GOP voters’ dissatisfaction with incumbents’ handling of elections.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer lost his primary to State Representative Justin Heap. Richer pulled around 129,300 votes to Heap’s 161,900 votes; total voter turnout amounted to 30 percent.
Democratic write-in candidate Emilia Cortez will appear on the November ballot, since she received enough votes to qualify.
