One of America’s most notable election fraud whistleblowers, David Lara, is set to win the Yuma County Recorder’s race.
As of Saturday afternoon, Lara, a Republican, lead the race with 23,512 to Democrat Emilia Cortez’s 13,708.
Lara was also re-elected to the Yuma Union High School District Governing Board, leading the race with 13,991 votes, Carlos “Coach” Gonzales in second place with 11,133 votes, and Edward C. Thomas taking third place with 9,283 votes.
Lara defeated incumbent Richard Colwell in the Republican Primary.
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.
“Watch out, here I come,” Lara told the Arizona Daily Independent. “I want to thank the voters for their confidence in me, and I pledge to ensure that their voices will continue to be heard.”
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.
Lara delivered an address RNC Convention this past summer month, but he didn’t discuss election integrity at all.
Lara serves on the board of Conserva Mi Voto, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to empowering the Latino community through civic engagement.
