Nevada secretary of state won’t lift handcount ban
Order comes following state court ruling
RENO, Nev. — Nevada’s secretary of state declined Friday to lift a ban on a rural county’s controversial early handcount of mail-in ballots, saying a modified procedure the county clerk proposed still raises “concerns relating to the integrity of the election.”
Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske ordered Nye County last week to halt its handcounting of ballots until after polls close on Nov. 8. Her order came after the Nevada Supreme Court issued an opinion siding with the American Civil Liberties Union’s objections to the reading of individual votes out loud.
In a letter to the county Friday, Cegavske invited county officials to update or better explain their proposal for a silent handcount with more details.
But the move makes it increasingly difficult for Nye County to revise, submit, get approval and carry out plans for the handcount of mail-in ballots before polls close on Election Day.
Meanwhile, the ACLU and the sprawling, heavily GOP county halfway between Reno and Las Vegas continued to argue over the circumstances that led to an election official, who was openly carrying a gun, removing an ACLU observer from the handcount that lasted two days before Cegavske suspended it last Thursday night.
Lawyers for Nye County said in a new letter to Cegavske Friday that the chairman of the Nye County GOP Central Committee, who was legally armed, was acting as a handcount volunteer trained by county Interim Clerk Mark Kampf when she confronted the ACLU observer she believed was tallying the vote count in violation of the recount rules.
The ACLU quickly responded and the dispute could last past Election Day.
But the rejection of the county’s late-hatched proposal to resume the handcount in silence puts the early count of mail-in ballots almost out of reach by the time polls close.
Kampf proposed three talliers and a control team with two independent verifiers who mostly worked separately, so there would be no reader who called out each ballot or verifier, who looked over the reader’s shoulder.
Cegavske listed a number of concerns in explaining why she would need more details before she allowed the count to resume.
She noted the silent handcount will require the “complete focused attention” on each ballot by talliers that will prevent them from noticing when other talliers make wrongful marks or mistakes.
“Additionally, there are no provisions in your plan describing the required use of medicalstyle gloves to further mitigate the risk of cheating or accidental marking, nor a prescribed and standardized device for tallying to ensure any new mark could be quickly identified,” she said.
Nye County is one of the first jurisdictions nationwide to act on election conspiracies related to mistrust in voting machines, though other counties across Nevada have considered using handcounts in the future.
Earlier Friday, lawyers for the county rejected the ACLU's recent accusations of a “coordinated partisan election administration effort” in a letter to Cegavske’s office asking for an investigation into the handcount. Hours later the ACLU responded, doubling down on its concerns.
The ACLU’s complaint about the removal of its observer by Nye County GOP Central Committee Vice Chair Laura Larsen raised concerns about Kampf ’s delegation of authority to partisan officials to remove observers from handcount rooms, particularly during a handcount process dealing with ballot tabulation.
Along with noting Nevada is an open-carry state, Nye County's lawyers said the county understood Larsen, a trained volunteer, had never threatened to use the firearm.
Larsen’s position as the vice chair of Nye County’s GOP central committee “does not limit or invalidate her ability to participate as a poll worker/volunteer,” the response added.
But the ACLU said in a letter to the secretary of state’s office that the county’s response “further emphasizes that Larsen is, in fact, not serving in a neutral capacity” and remains active in partisan leadership.
In an interview with The Associated Press after the first day of handcounting, Larsen said her role was “making sure things are going the way Mark (Kampf ) has set everything up. So, just looking out for the election integrity.” She did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment on Friday.