A Hispanic man delivers absentee ballots, and now conservatives want him dead
![Ben Marine (Screen capture)](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20141023000711im_/http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ben-marine-screen-capture-800x430.jpg)
Conservatives are outraged over what they claim, mistakenly, to be evidence of massive voter fraud being perpetrated in Arizona, The Daily Dot reports.
In the video — which was posted at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze under the headline, “Surveillance video apparently catches guy doing something at the ballot box that left Republican monitor stunned” — Ben Marine can be seen entering the lobby of the polling station in a Citizens for a Better Arizona (CBA) shirt and delivering absentee ballots he had collected.
Despite the outrage from conservative sites, Marine was not behaving illegally when he delivered the ballots to the polling station.
But A.J. LaFaro, the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, told the Arizona Daily Independent that Marine’s behavior was suspicious, and complained that Marine was “a vulgar, direspectful, violent thug that has no respect for our laws. I would have followed him to the parking lot to take down his tag number but I feared for my life.”
“I believe it’s inconceivable,” LaFaro continued, “unacceptable and should be illegal for groups to collect hundreds, if not thousands, of voter’s ballots and return them to the elections offices or polling locations.”
In Arizona, however, it is not illegal for groups like the CBA to collect absentee ballots and deliver them on behalf of the citizens who filled them out. As stated in the Arizona Elections Manual, “[a]fter [voters] have securely sealed the voted ballot inside the early ballot return envelope, voters may voluntarily give their voted early ballot to a person of their choice for delivery to the Recorder or a polling place.”
Moreover, according to the president emeritus of the CBA, Randy Parraz, the group typically delivers thousands of ballots at a time, making the hundreds delivered in the video “look like a pittance.”
LaFaro also complained about the so-called “ballot parties,” “where people gather en masse and give their unvoted ballots to operatives of organizations like Citizens for a Better Arizona so they can not only collect them but vote them illegally.” There is no evidence that the CBA collects blank absentee ballots from members of the Latino community and fills them out for them.
He then lamented that “America used to be a nation of laws where one person had one vote. I’m sad to say not anymore.” As Wonkette reported, LaFaro knows that the practice he claims to be illegal is not — because the bill he supported to outlaw it, HB 2305, was repealed by the legislature earlier this year.
Commenters on the video’s YouTube are calling for Marine’s death. “This is a high crime, it is treason to this country and a betrayal of democracy,” one writes. “This should be a crime punishable by death.”
“I am going to find this illegal-loving scumbag and kill him,” writes another.
Watch the video of Marine legally depositing absentee ballots at an Arizona polling station below.