NV Bill Would Permanently Obstruct Citizen Voter Roll Cleanup

If anyone isn’t sure whether Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar is thwarting efforts to clean up Nevada’s dirty voter rolls, his new bill, AB 534, removes all doubt.

There are two ways for citizens to challenge the eligibility of a voter who has moved from the residence where they are registered to vote — known as “Section 535” and “Section 547.”

Last year, our group, the Pigpen Project, filed thousands of challenges using both sections. In response, Aguilar’s office claimed challenges like ours lacked “personal knowledge” that the voter had moved.

If the post office’s National Change of Address (NCOA) database shows that a voter has permanently moved, Aguilar has declared that such information gleaned from this official government database doesn’t equate to “personal knowledge.” But “personal knowledge” is not defined in the Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS), only in the secretary of state’s implementing regulations. It’s only his opinion. Besides, Section 535 only requires challengers to attest “that he or she has personal knowledge of the facts set forth in the affidavit” (emphasis added).

Indeed, if a Pigpen volunteer went to a suspected “moved” voter’s address, and the current resident confirmed that the voter had moved and no longer lived there, that still arguably wouldn’t be enough for Aguilar, who wants to dismiss “knowledge obtained from a third party.”

Cementing Aguilar’s Bad Definitions into Law

Aguilar has included in his massive, omnibus election reform bill new language to cement his definition of “personal knowledge” in NRS. Here’s the proposed language:

For the purposes of this section, ‘personal knowledge’ means firsthand knowledge through  experience or observation of the facts upon each ground that the challenge is based. The term does not include knowledge obtained from a third party, including, without limitation, information obtained from the review of data in a database or other compilation of information.

Oh, come on.

Common sense says that if the current resident says the voter no longer lives there, that should be enough to trigger the issuance by election officials of the postcard (as per state law) to the moved voter requesting confirmation that he still lives where he’s registered. If a voter doesn’t confirm that he still lives there within 30 days, then the voter is shifted from “active” status to “inactive” status, meaning he won’t automatically be mailed a ballot.

Aguilar is acting as if he wants those voters to remain on the voter rolls as “active” and receive an automatic mail-in ballot. Why else would he try to put into law a prohibition on using information from a “third party,” such as the current resident?

Similarly, why would he try to rewrite the law to block challenges from citizens who use the NCOA database, compiled by the United States Postal Service, to identify voters who told the post office that they’d moved permanently from the address where they are registered? That’s exactly what the Pigpen Project has been using to flag suspected moved voters.

Now get a load of this. Here’s what current law says:

NRS 293.5303: [T]he county clerk in each county may enter into an agreement with the United States Postal Service or any person authorized by it to obtain the data compiled by the United States Postal Service concerning changes of addresses of its postal patrons for use by the county clerk to correct the portions of the statewide voter registration list relevant to the county clerk.

NRS293.5307: If a county clerk enters into an agreement pursuant to NRS 293.5303, the county clerk shall review each notice of a change of address filed with the United States Postal Service by a resident of the county and identify each resident who is a registered voter and has moved to a new address. Before removing or correcting information in the statewide voter registration list, the county clerk shall mail a notice to each such registered voter and follow the procedures set forth in NRS 293.530.

Now let’s make sure everyone understands the insanity behind Aguilar’s position on this.

By law, the county clerks “may” — but are not required to — use the NCOA database for the purpose of cleaning up Nevada’s dirty voter rolls. In other words, our government overlords are allowed to use the exact same database the Pigpen Project has been using to identify moved voters. But we, the great unwashed, can’t.

Now, if the county clerks were doing so, this wouldn’t be such a big deal, and the voter rolls wouldn’t be so dirty. But for various reasons, the clerks have either chosen not to use the NCOA database to clean the voter files or are doing an insufficient job of it.

So the Pigpen Project has been trying to help them do it, only to have Aguilar tell us to shove it up our keisters. And now he wants to put his obstruction into law.

Why? It certainly seems like he doesn’t want the voter rolls cleaned up – by us or by the county clerks.

Looking the Other Way

Aguilar is now hiding behind “personal knowledge” as an excuse not to investigate voters who the NCOA database says have permanently moved and yet who appear to have still voted last November by mail.

Now, understand that ballots are not supposed to be forwarded to a voter by the post office if the voter has moved. So if a voter who moved was sent a ballot anyway, it’s highly likely that somebody other than the voter got ahold of the voter’s mail-in ballot and illegally voted it. That would be election fraud, but Aguilar seems determined not to investigate it.

Pigpen Project director Iris Stone has submitted 881 Election Integrity Violation Reports (EIVR) on what appeared to be such suspicious votes over the past few weeks.

But Aguilar has since rejected them. In a response letter, his office said it would “not be taking action on EIVRs that indicate, based on third-party data and not personal knowledge, that a voter might have changed residence.”

Challenges and EIVRs are the only way for citizens to protect their vote from being canceled out by someone else voting illegally. And Aguilar’s AB 534 would eliminate that recourse.

This is such a critically important protection that legislators should either remove it from the bill or vote against it. And if the Democrat majority passes the bill with this provision in it, I hope Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoes it.

This article was adapted from one originally published by the Pigpen Project, with permission.

Chuck Muth is the president of the Citizen Outreach Foundation. Pigpen Project was launched in January 2023 and is a project of the Citizen Outreach Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.