By Dustin Gardiner | The Arizona Republic
An Arizona state senator appears to have plagiarized parts of his answers to a 2016 candidate questionnaire that appeared on azcentral.com.
The accusations against Sen. Juan Mendez, D-Tempe, surfaced Tuesday on the website Arizona Democrats Exposed, a partisan research site operated by GOP operative Brian Anderson.
Using Google searches, Anderson said, he found “significant portions” of Mendez’s answers were lifted from other sources without attribution, including The Washington Post, President Barack Obama and the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
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Mendez’s answers were included in The Arizona Republic’s online voters’ guide for the 2016 election, which featured questionnaires from dozens of candidates for state office.
The Republic independently compared several of Mendez’s responses from the questionnaire with other sources and also found passages with identical or similar wording.
Mendez did not respond to multiple messages left on his cell phone.
