(Chuck Muth) – Now that the 2024 elections are in the bank, I wanted to give supporters of our Pigpen Project a post-election report on some of the things we found in our first year of operations, as well as a roadmap for where we’re going from here…
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar – and other progressives – love to say there’s “no evidence” of “widespread” fraud that could “affect an election.” Two things…
1.) It’s hard to find evidence if you never look for it.
2.) There was a race this year in which the results *might* have been affected by ineligible voters.
That doesn’t make us “election deniers.” That makes us “election questioners.”
In any event, we’ve learned a lot over the past year about Nevada’s fouled-up election laws and what needs to be done to clean our dirty voter rolls.
We’ve also learned that Nevada’s Secretary of State and Attorney General have no interest in doing what’s necessary to fix the problems.
From the Beginning
We started working with Clark County election officials last January. They were very helpful in providing guidance on how to submit residency disputes that we were able to identify using the post office’s National Change of Address (NCOA) data.
Then in March Secretary Aguilar issued a private memo to all 17 of Nevada’s county clerks/registrars erecting barriers to working with us. He claimed they needed permission from their county commissions to process registration confirmations.
That forced us to file official challenges to suspected “moved” voters in Clark County just before the June primary. Those challenges were rejected by the district attorney, supposedly for lacking “personal knowledge” that the voter had moved.
Our opponents’ highly-restrictive definition of “personal knowledge” is a HUGE problem with getting the rolls cleaned up and the Legislature needs to do something about it in next year’s session.
In the meantime, we pulled the voter registration data from the first week in April and compared it to the list of people who voted in the June primary. And get this: We found a couple hundred voters who were on the INACTIVE list – meaning they shouldn’t have been mailed a ballot – who VOTED BY MAIL!
Now, it’s possible that some of those voters contacted the election department and updated their registration before ballots were mailed out. But this is definitely something that needs to be investigated. And we’re on it.
At the end of July, we filed almost 4,000 “challenges” of voters suspected as having moved from where they were registered based on NCOA data. But not only had they filed a change of address, we were able to confirm that they’d RE-REGISTERED to vote in their new state.
Some of the county clerks processed the challenges – but all throttled the process after receiving another private memo from Secretary Aguilar in late August directing them not to.
After Nevada completed its 90-day “purge” of ineligible voters using the current “Routine List Maintenance” (RLM) process in the first week of August, we filed an additional 30,000+ challenges of voters who were MISSED by the RLM process.
Off to Court
But due to Secretary Aguilar’s directive, none of them were processed. Which forced us to file a number of lawsuits asking the court to reverse the directive.
The lawsuits served a critical purpose. It forced the Secretary of State and the Attorney General to put down in writing the reasons for denying the challenges. And they threw the kitchen sink at us!
After reviewing their arguments, we realized most were easy to correct – even though we still disagreed with their position – in future submissions. We also came to realize we’d made one technical, but critical, mistake in submitting the challenges.
The SOS and AG never brought this mistake up in their arguments, but it likely would have been discovered if we’d gone to court. So rather than play out a losing hand, we withdrew those first lawsuits and went back to the drawing board.
Armed with the new information, a group of Pigpen Project volunteers submitted new challenges that fixed some of the issues raised by opponents in the first lawsuits. However, the Carson City district attorney – citing “guidance” from the SOS and AG’s office – rejected them as well.
So we filed another lawsuit.
First, opponents attempted to have the case dismissed by arguing that our volunteer lacked “standing” – a technical issue used effectively to kill previous lawsuits filed by others. The good news is, they lost on the “standing” issue.
The bad news is the judge determined that our volunteer still lacked “personal knowledge” that the voter had moved, even though our volunteer actually knocked on the door and the current resident confirmed the voter no longer lived there.
The judge determined that this STILL didn’t constitute “first-hand” personal knowledge because the volunteer didn’t speak directly to the voter who no longer lived where the voter was registered. It was characterized as “hearsay” evidence.
Talk about playing against a stacked deck.
I guess the only way for us to have “personal knowledge” that a voter had moved is if we’d helped them pack their boxes, loaded them in the U-Haul, and drove them to their new out-of-state home!
Ridiculous.
But our attorney, David O’Mara, saw this coming.
So around the same time I personally went to the doors of suspected “moved” voters in my own precinct and simply wrote on my half-dozen challenges, “The voter does not reside at the address listed above” and signed a statement under penalty of perjury that I had personal knowledge of that fact.
Now here’s the thing…
The Clark County district attorney AGAIN rejected my challenges due to “lack of personal knowledge.” But how did he come to that conclusion since I didn’t cite the nature of the personal knowledge I possessed?
Had they asked, I would have informed them that I DID speak directly with two of the challenged voters personally via phone who confirmed they had, indeed, moved – exactly the kind of “first-person” contact required by the judge.
Instead, the DA just dismissed them out of hand without even asking. These folks simply don’t want to do what’s needed to be done to truly clean up the voter files – even when we do it exactly as they direct!
At the time of writing, I’ve filed a Public Records Request seeking the name of the official in the DA’s office who rejected my challenges without basis and will consider filing yet another lawsuit in this matter.
In the meantime…
Fraud Busters
One of the biggest differences between what the Pigpen Project has done this year vs. what the GOP and others did following the 2020 general election is that we identified suspected ineligible voters BEFORE the election, not after. And through our challenges, we put our suspicions officially on record.
So what we’re doing now is bumping our 30,000+ challenges up against the list of voters who voted in the November 2024 general election. And we’ve already found a couple thousand who voted but may have been ineligible since they moved.
Which means we now actually have a very narrow list of possible fraudulently cast ballots.
Again, that doesn’t mean the “moved” voter voted unlawfully. But it might mean someone obtained their ballot and fraudulently voted it for them. Either way, it’s a problem.
So now our Pigpen Project volunteers will be trying to contact the suspicious voters to try to confirm if, in fact, they’d moved and if someone else cast a ballot in their name.
And when we can confirm such, we’ll file official Election Integrity Complaint reports with the SOS to investigate.
Unfortunately, we filed a similar complaint back in April under similar circumstances. However, the SOS has refused to tell us the results of their investigation. So we filed another official Public Records Request last week seeking details.
They have since responded back that they can’t fulfill the request until after the holidays. We’ll see if they continue to stonewall us.
And I’ll close with this for now…
Whisker-Close Race
Whenever the subject of possible voter fraud comes up, those trying to stop us from assisting in cleaning up the voter files say there’s no evidence of “widespread” voter fraud.
That’s the key word they use to hide suspicious activity and not pursue it..
But voting fraud doesn’t have to be “widespread” to make a difference. In fact, the Ward 2 race for North Las Vegas City Council was decided by just EIGHT votes.
And get this…
Our initial investigation shows that eleven voters in Ward 2 were on the INACTIVE list on September 10, 2024, yet somehow still cast a ballot BY MAIL in the November 5th election.
That’s suspicious and troubling.
Worse, we’ve identified 267 voters who filed a change-of-address with the post office but were still on the Ward 2 ACTIVE list and voted in the Ward 2 race, with 24 of them voting BY MAIL.
Similar suspicious voting activities occurred in a number of other races – including some of the most closely contested races for the Legislature.
Enough to affect the outcome? Maybe yes, maybe no. We’re going to look into it.
And what about the 1,600 uncounted ballots Clark County “found” after the deadline had passed? We’ll be filing a Public Records Request asking for details.
And what about the 9,000 or so voters who chose not to “cure” their ballots after they were rejected for some reason by the election department?
I mean, if they were legitimate voters who took the time to vote, why wouldn’t they “cure” their ballot?
Unless the actual voter wasn’t the person who cast the ballot. We’re going to investigate this ourselves since we know election officials won’t.
Again, this doesn’t make us “election deniers.” It makes us “election questioners.” And these are legitimate questions that need to be asked and answered.
This work is going to be a long, arduous, sensitive, time-consuming, and costly effort. But since Secretary Aguilar seems to have no interest in doing his job, we’re being forced to do it for them.
Did we accomplish all we’d hoped to accomplish for the 2024 elections? No. But it was one helluva a learning experience – especially learning that our Secretary of State has no interest in cleaning up the voter rolls himself.
And I dare say we now probably know the laws, administrative codes, legislative histories, processes, and procedures better than many of the “professionals” currently in charge of our elections.
Which means our work isn’t done. Indeed, as the song goes, we’ve only just begun.
And if you appreciate what we’ve accomplished so far and would like to help fund our continuing work on this project in 2025, please consider making an end-of-year tax-deductible contribution by clicking here.
THANK YOU!
The Pigpen Project is a project of Citizen Outreach Foundation, an IRS-approved 501(c)(3) grassroots organization founded in 1992. Donations are tax-deductible for federal income tax purposes.