(Chuck Muth) – Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar likes to say that “Nevada runs some of the most secure, safest and accessible elections in the country.”
It’s just not true.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not alleging “widespread” fraud without documentation here.
The notion that our elections are “secure” – after the Secretary spent the better part of the last year blocking our efforts to clean up the voter rolls, leaving us open to shenanigans – is a stretch.
But it’s even worse than that.
Anjeanette Damon – an exceptionally professional veteran journalist in Reno – and Nicole Santa Cruz inked an article for ProPublica that raises serious doubts about the security of elections in Washoe County – Nevada’s #1 “swing” county.
The article centers around Cari-Ann Burgess, the former interim Registrar of Voters who is embroiled in a kerfuffle with the embattled (“Washoe County Manager Caught Drinking At Local Bar While on Medical Leave”) county manager, Eric Brown.
Brown placed her on “administrative leave” back in September for “insubordination and poor job performance.” But I’m not buying it.
Last April, when the Pigpen Project was preparing to expand our voter file cleanup operations outside of Clark County, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Cari-Ann during a trip to Reno. And I was impressed.
She has experience running elections, was open to working with us, and was just a nice, down-to-earth individual trying to fix a world of problems left to her by the previous registrar.
But she was forced out of the job less than two months before Election Day.
According to the Damon/Cruz investigation/report, Cari-Ann is considering filing “a whistleblower complaint soon, asking for federal oversight of Nevada’s future elections.”
Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound like “the most secure, safest and accessible elections in the country.” So maybe we better look into this.
The heart of the problem seems to be over Secretary Aguilar’s rush to implement a new $30 million “top-down” voter registration system called VREMS (Voter Registration and Election Management Solution) this year.
It was supposed to be implemented earlier this year before the primary but got delayed because of all kinds of technical problems. It should have been postponed until AFTER this critical presidential election, but Aguilar insisted on bringing it online in August.
Shortly thereafter, Cari-Ann started raising alarm bells. She believed the problems with implementing the new system “were so daunting, they likely couldn’t be fixed by the county’s understaffed registrar’s office before early voting began.”
Indeed, Damon/Cruz report, the launch “strained understaffed county clerk offices already contending with their routine general election responsibilities.”
“Mock elections conducted before the system went live resulted in a list of 20 issues the state and its vendor had to resolve,” the article noted. However, Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Di Chiara “refused to provide a description of the issues.”
So much for “transparency.”
Di Chiara maintained that the lack of voter complaints meant the new system was working. Burgess disagrees, saying incorrect voter data ended up in the new system because the Secretary of State rushed implementation.
The article also notes that “messy data” from Washoe’s system “made its way into the new system” and “was just one of a multitude of data errors.”
Election officials denied the allegations but admitted “they continued to discover problems before voting began,” including, according to Burgess, noncitizens being included on the voter rolls.
“I’m worried that people who should not be voting are voting,” she told the reporters.
That fear is far from unfounded. Back in the spring the Pigpen Project helped a voter get taken off the Active voter file who had declined to register because he was a noncitizen but ended up on the voter rolls anyway thanks to the DMV.
He never cast a ballot. But how many others did? Inquiring minds wanna know.
For blowing the whistle, Cari-Ann’s future with the Registrar’s office is in doubt and she’s considering filing a lawsuit.
I hope so. From personal experience I’ve learned the hard way that the only way to get information out of Secretary Aguilar’s operation is to force it to justify its actions and positions in court.
Time for some bright light and disinfectant.