How All-Mail Balloting Made Nevada’s Messy Voter Rolls ‘Worse’
In Nevada, the automatic mailing of ballots to all individuals on the voter rolls has raised concerns about the integrity of the voter registration system, as the state struggles with maintaining accurate records. Chuck Muth, president of the Citizen Outreach Foundation, highlighted the urgency of having clean voter files to combat potential fraud, especially after the 2021 law reform that mandates ballot mailing for all active voters.
The foundation’s initiative, known as the Pigpen Project, has filed legal challenges against nearly 4,000 registrants it believes are no longer eligible to vote in the state, primarily focusing on Clark County. Their findings, based on data from the Nevada secretary of state’s office combined with the U.S. Postal Service’s address changes, identified 102 individuals who supposedly voted in other states after moving from Nevada.
Muth criticized the lack of stringent efforts by election officials to ensure voter eligibility, claiming that many individuals stay on the rolls due to insufficient verification. Nevada’s unique requirement for automatic mail-in ballots, along with its high population turnover, exacerbates the issue of maintaining accurate voter lists. Despite challenges, including a recent investigation initiated by the Secretary of State’s office, state officials continue to face scrutiny regarding their processes for keeping voter registration lists up to date.
Nevada’s system of automatically mailing a ballot to everyone on the voter roll makes the state’s failure to keep clean voter rolls more dire, says the president of a watchdog group that last week claimed to have found more than 100 people on Nevada’s voter rolls who voted in another state.
“The biggest problem is that they changed the law in 2021 so that every active voter is automatically mailed a ballot, so we need the cleanest possible voter files to protect against potential fraud,” Chuck Muth, president and CEO of the Citizen Outreach Foundation, told The Federalist.
Based in Nevada, the Citizen Outreach Foundation aims to ensure accuracy within the state’s voter rolls through the Pigpen Project. That initiative assists local election officials by identifying individuals who are no longer eligible to remain on the Silver State’s voter registration lists.
Last week, Muth’s team issued a report disclosing they have filed legal challenges contesting the eligibility of nearly 4,000 registrants they claim are no longer eligible to remain on Nevada’s voter rolls due to no longer living in the state. Most of these challenges (3,116) were filed in Clark County, the state’s most populous locality.
According to the report, the Pigpen Project used voter registration data managed by the Nevada secretary of state’s office and the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address database to identify the allegedly unlawful registrations. It also compared this information with the “official voter registration records of 15 other states.”
With this information, the group claims to have identified at least 102 individuals who have moved out of Nevada and whose “records show they’ve actually VOTED in their new state.” It also purportedly “uncovered one instance where a voter appears to have voted in both Nevada and Texas in the 2022 general election.” The Pigpen Project has since filed a legal complaint on the voter earlier this year, “which is currently being investigated by the Secretary of State,” according to the report.
The office of Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on the status of that investigation.
According to the report, the provision of state law the Pigpen Project used to file the challenges requires Nevada election officials to send a “registration confirmation postcard” to the challenged voter, at which point the voter is given 33 days to return the postcard or else their registration status will be moved from “active” to “inactive.” According to Aguilar’s office, such postcards were recently mailed to more than 150,000 registrants asking them to confirm their “active” status.
While federal law requires states to make “a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters,” the Pigpen Project contends that some officials “fulfill that requirement only by moving people from active to inactive who have their ballots returned by the post office after an election or by a bulk mailing to all active voters every other year.” This lack of due diligence, according to the group, “has allowed tens of thousands of ‘moved’ voters, who are missed by the post office for various reasons, to remain on our voter rolls.”
[READ:[READ:Pigpen Project Puts Boots On The Ground To Expose Nevada’s Dirty Voter Rolls]
Unlike most states, Nevada requires local clerks to automatically mail individuals listed on the state’s active voter registration list a ballot during each election cycle, according to Ballotpedia. That change was included in a 2021 election bill signed by then-Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak that expanded the state’s use of unsupervised mail-in voting.
Muth said Nevada’s adoption of an all-mail voting system, combined with its status as a historically transient state, has made an already difficult task of cleaning its voter rolls “worse.”
“People move in and out of Nevada, especially in the Reno and Las Vegas areas, on a regular basis. So, this is an ongoing problem,” Muth said. “A lot of states that have a more stable population don’t have the challenges that we have here.”
A documentary released by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) in May showed numerous errors within the state’s voter rolls. As my colleague Matt Kittle reported, PILF’s Lauren Bis “showed up on a lot of doorsteps around Las Vegas … [and] was greeted with a lot of quizzical looks from employees at the casinos, fast food restaurants, retailers, post offices, funeral homes, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, and jails where registered voters — at least according to Nevada’s dirty voter rolls — ‘resided.’”
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard, which grades states and the District of Columbia on the strength of their election laws, ranks Nevada as having the second-worst election laws in the country.
Despite these challenges, Muth said he is “happy” about the progress his group is making on cleaning the Silver State’s voter rolls, citing cooperation from local election officials.
“The local officials in Clark County, where Las Vegas is [and] where most of our work has been done, have been extremely cooperative and helpful,” Muth said. “They’ve actually given us guidance and showed us what forms we have to use and how to submit them and who to submit them to.”
“I can’t complain about the local election officials, they’ve been absolutely great to work with,” he added.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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Mail-in ballots have fraud inherently built into the system. Who knows of any government agency that actually has all of its files up to date? We need a national Election Day holiday where people show up with a legitimate ID, not an utility bill, and vote in person.
The last presidential election, I actually received my ballot and 4 others. People who lived at my address years ago. I took them with me to the polling place. I wrote with sharpie ” NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS”.