A former leader of the pro-Trump group Turning Point Action was sentenced on Tuesday to two years of probation and barred from running for office for five years for forging voters’ signatures on his petitions as part of his 2024 bid for re-election to the Arizona House.
The former state legislator, Austin Smith, pleaded guilty in November to two criminal counts and admitted that he had submitted fraudulent signatures to state election officials, including the name of a woman who had died.
The outcome was a striking twist for Mr. Smith, 30, a Republican who represented the Phoenix suburbs for one term and had repeatedly sought to sow doubt about the Arizona results in the 2020 election, when President Trump lost his re-election bid.
Mr. Smith did not speak during his sentencing, but his lawyer, Kurt Altman, told a Superior Court judge in Maricopa County that his client was “mortified” by his conduct.
“He realizes that things got out of hand,” Mr. Altman said. “He’s embarrassed by the lapse in judgment and can assure this court he’s not going to be back here, he’s not going to have issues with probation and he’s not going to run for office again.”
While trying to qualify for the Republican primary to run for re-election, Mr. Smith was accused in a court complaint in April 2024 of forging dozens of signatures on his nominating petitions. The complaint was filed by one of his constituents, James Ashurst, a Democrat, who said the signatures resembled Mr. Smith’s handwriting.
Three days after being named in the complaint, Mr. Smith resigned from his post as a senior director for Turning Point Action, the political arm of Turning Point USA, the grass-roots group founded by Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was assassinated last September. Mr. Smith also abandoned his bid for re-election, but denied any wrongdoing at the time.
State election officials referred the complaint to the Arizona attorney general’s office, which pursued Mr. Smith’s prosecution. Last June, a grand jury indicted Mr. Smith on 14 criminal counts in Superior Court in Maricopa County, four of which were felonies.
In November, Mr. Smith agreed to plead guilty to two non-felony counts of attempted fraudulent schemes and illegal signing of election petitions, which allowed him to avoid jail time. He was also fined $5,500.
Turning Point officials did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday, including questions about whether Mr. Smith had resumed his affiliation with the group, as some critics have suggested.
Mr. Ashurst, who filed the original complaint against Mr. Smith, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Smith had falsely cast himself as a champion of election integrity.
“At the same time Smith was forging nomination petition signatures, he was also using his platform as an elected official to question the integrity of Arizona elections while he simultaneously used the Turning Point platform to undermine the integrity of Arizona elections,” Mr. Ashurst said. “The hypocrisy is staggering and leads me, and I’m sure many others, to have greater concerns about the motivations of those questioning the strength of our democracy.”
Mr. Smith’s onetime campaign website prominently featured a section on election integrity and photos of him with Mr. Trump and Kari Lake, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2024 who refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and her 2022 defeat in the Arizona governor’s race.
In a social media post in May 2023, Mr. Smith impugned the process for checking voters’ signatures.
“Signature verification in Maricopa County is a joke,” he said at the time.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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