A grassroots activist concerned about election fraud worked for Maricopa County Elections Department in signature verification for five weeks prior to the 2020 election. After she was fired for what she said she believes was asking too many questions, she continued to look into anomalies, such as signatures accepted on mail-in ballot affidavits that did not match the voters’ signatures on their voter registrations. The volunteer activist canvassed some of the homes with mismatching signatures after the 2020 general election looking for votes to cure on behalf of Trump Victory, a project of the Trump Campaign.
The volunteer discovered that many of them — which were generally modest homes in heavily Democratic areas — had exactly 25 people registered to vote at each address.
Shelby Busch, co-founder of We the People AZ Alliance, which has worked uncovering evidence of wrongdoing in the 2020 and 2022 elections, told The Arizona Sun Times, “Unfortunately, these stories are not isolated occurrences. We received similar reports all across the state of Arizona.”
Busch explained how her team found while preparing for Abe Hamadeh’s election lawsuit, “thousands of voters across the state who were disenfranchised from voting, many of whom never even knew their vote didn’t count. This includes people who showed up to vote and a ballot had already been received, people whose voter registrations were altered without their knowledge or consent and registered voters who didn’t even appear in the registration records,” she said.
The activist told The Sun Times about one small house in the West Valley where an elderly woman lived alone. Records showed there were 20 people registered to vote at that address. When the activist asked the woman about them, she said she recognized the name of one of them as her daughter’s boyfriend who lived “around the corner.” The homeowner’s mailbox was located outside of her fence, the canvasser noted, where anyone could easily open it and take out mail. The activist suspected that someone was deliberately using the woman’s home without her knowledge, taking advantage of the fact she was elderly and had an easily accessible mailbox, to ballot harvest.
At another house, the volunteer canvasser said that the resident admitted six of the people registered to vote there actually lived in Mexico.
Troubled by the different phone numbers provided for Republicans and Democrats for curing ballots, the activist sought to follow up with voters who and that the number for Republicans “went straight to voicemail.”
The volunteer received lists of voters from Trump Victory who the campaign said they believed likely needed their ballots cured. But, she said she noticed that when she stopped by those voters’ homes to try and cure their ballots, the residents told her that others had already stopped by claiming they were there to help with the same thing. She said she was shocked to learn that those residents’ ballots did not, in fact, show as having been cured on Maricopa County’s ballot tracker tool, beballotready.vote.
The activist said another common theme she found was parents receiving ballots for their adult children years after they had moved out of the state.
Other anomalies included people voting who weren’t registered to vote, and so-called “double voters” – people who were registered and successfully cast two ballots, with subtle differences in the spelling of their names but identical dates-of-birth and address.
Busch said that one of the most frequent complaints she hears from voters is when they are told at their polling place that their ballot has already been returned.
She said, “This is robbery at the highest level. These people are having their entire identity hijacked. They are stealing people’s vote, their voice and their personal identity.”
Busch told The Sun Times, “We spoke to three separate couples that reported they were documented as voting mail-in ballots for the 2020 or the 2022 election even though they voted in-person,” she said. “We assisted them in getting copies of their registration files and confirmed they were not the signers on the ballots’ affidavits.”
Busch said it was part of a larger problem. “During our signature verification audit,” she said, “a consistent 20 percent of signatures clearly failed to match and at minimum should have gone to curing, however they were approved in first review and the ballots were counted without question.”
The activist said in her investigations into the election anomalies, she discovered that her sister, who died in 2018, voted in the 2020 election. She asked for the official printout record regarding the vote from Maricopa County, but when they provided it, she found that it was impossible to understand. She asked officials to explain it to her and they refused.
While working for Maricopa County in signature verification, the activist said part of her job was encouraging residents at facilities for people with dementia to vote, which she found disturbing. Another problem was the county gave employees “busy work” to do that was meaningless, such as repeatedly rearranging how the braille ballots were to be sent out.
A precinct committee member who the activist works with, Carol Ayotte, said 5,000 voters in her Legislative District 27 discovered that due to a “glitch” from the state’s MVD Service Arizona, either their party registration was changed to PND, Party Not Designated, or their county of residence was switched to another county. The county has since admitted that when voters registered a car in another county, the glitch would switch their voter registration to that county. When those voters showed up to vote, they were forced to vote a provisional ballot, and many discovered that the provisional ballots were never counted later.
Busch concluded, “This is why it is critical that we clean up the voter rolls and engage in the process. Our election officials must be held accountable for their failure to acknowledge these issues and make changes to secure our elections. Ignorance and incompetence is no longer an excuse.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Mail in Ballots” by Cindy Shebley. CC BY 2.0.
