By Free Republic | Created at 2024-12-26 06:03:57 | Updated at 2024-12-26 18:52:45
13 hours ago
Nevada is investigating hundreds of potential election integrity violations from the 2024 elections, including 180 open cases of double-voting, according to a Friday report from the secretary of state’s office.
The office noted 182 investigations of potential double-voting in the state, with only two having been resolved, with no violation found. Likewise, for 2024’s primary and general elections, 762 Election Integrity Violation Reports were filed by Nevadans who believe state election law has been violated, but 515 cases have been closed with no violation found, while 243 cases remain open and four were found to be violative of election law.
“The Secretary of State’s report is only scratching the surface of this problem, which exists because Nevada’s voter rolls are still littered with voters who have moved out of state. Yet Secretary Aguilar has stymied efforts by outside groups such as the Pigpen Project to assist in cleaning them up,” Chuck Muth, president of the Citizen Outreach Foundation (COF), which runs the Pigpen Project, told The Federalist.
“Worse, the report is seriously lacking in transparency. Nevadans need and deserve to know exactly what happened on each reported violation. It’s not enough to simply say the reports were ‘closed.’ We need to know the details so we know what to look for to stop potential voting fraud in advance, not after the horse has already gotten out of the barn.”
In elections this year, including primaries, only 11 cases from the violation reports and double-voting combined have been referred for potential prosecution, two of which were from a February presidential preference primary and nine of which are from the general election primary in June. There are no further details on the potential prosecutions in the report.
It is a felony to vote twice in Nevada, but the state must find intent to vote twice, according to the report, meaning a “mistake” would stop any legal action and a civil notice would be issued warning the voter to be more careful in the future. The example used in the report is a father mistakenly voting on his son’s ballot with whom he shares a name.
Other cases are referred for criminal investigation or prosecution, depending on the circumstances.
Despite the open cases and apparent frequency of double votes, as detailed in the report with past election violations, Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, D-Nev., stressed that “the 2024 election cycle was more secure than ever” in a press release.
In a piece about the report written by Muth, he explains that the gap between the number of open cases and the few that have been closed is an “underwhelming” result and the report appears to be “more about spinning PR than solving real problems.”
The report touted the state’s new election integrity tool, the Voter Registration and Election Management System (VREMS), which centralizes data, making it easier to detect violations across counties in cases of double voting. That system should streamline closing what Muth calls “straightforward cases.”
Noting the miniscule number of four confirmed violations outside double-voting and the hundreds being dismissed, Muth asked, “If these investigations yield so few actionable results, is the process flawed, or is the Secretary of State’s Office just not taking them seriously enough?”
Cross-state voting is also barely addressed in the report, but is supposed to be caught using the far-left Electronic Registration Information System (ERIC), which markets itself as a nonpolitical voter roll management system. It is used mostly by Democrat-run states, and many red states have pulled out of the program over its bias.
One case of cross-state voting could raise questions about the efficacy of ERIC for Nevada, and Muth said that the report does not detail how often ERIC voter roll checks find potential violations or how, if at all, Nevada pursues the violations when found.
Muth said Nevada’s voter rolls are a mess, and his organization has filed several citizen-led lawsuits to force Aguilar’s office to clean the rolls. As The Federalist reported, Aguilar’s office instructed local clerks to stop processing challenges by Muth’s organization.
Aguilar is getting in the way of cleaning voter rolls, as my colleague M.D. Kittle reported, and is hiding behind his “interpretation” of election law, which apparently warrants not dealing with the thousands of potential violations found by COF.
The Democrat secretary of state’s interpretation of state law makes it extremely difficult to file voter challenges, because his definition of having “personal knowledge” that a voter moved to a different address or state would essentially require a challenger to have a personal relationship with the person.
COF, however, knocked on doors and made phone calls to confirm the veracity of its challenges, which does not count as “personal knowledge” to Aguilar, allowing him to turn a blind eye to violations.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow.
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