(Chuck Muth) – Reporter Mark Robison of the Reno Gazette-Journal did a detailed story on the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) threatened lawsuit against the Nevada Secretary of State and various counties for allegedly not cleaning the voter rolls as required by federal law.
I debunked that threat a few days ago. Click here.
Some relevant excepts from Mr. Robison’s article…
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To learn more about whether Nevada’s voter registration numbers indicate potential problems, the RGJ reached out to a Nevada nonprofit whose goal is to clean up voter rolls, a national expert on voter registration, and Nevada election officials.
They weren’t impressed with the RNC’s findings. The likelihood that the letter is a political stunt was raised.
Chuck Muth runs the nonprofit Citizens Outreach Foundation, which has a program to clean up voter rolls called the Pigpen Project.
It sends volunteers door-to-door in Clark County asking people at specific addresses whether everyone publicly listed as a registered voter at that address really lives there. When they find names that shouldn't be registered at a location, it submits official forms to the registrar of voters to have them removed.
Since launching in March, the Pigpen Project has processed more than 1,000 names on Clark County’s voter rolls, Muth said. He thinks the RNC’s letter is political theater unlikely to lead to actual litigation.
That’s because the task of removing people from the list of active registered voters is a never-ending task that can always be improved, he said, but Nevada’s county clerks and registrars meet their legal requirements by regularly cleaning their rolls with updates logged through the U.S. Postal Service’s change of address process.
“They’re under constant pressure from their grassroots to do something on election integrity, election fraud,” he said of the RNC. “The letter allows them to tell their base they’re doing something constructive when they really aren’t.”
Muth said that actions like the RNC’s letter hurt Republicans and all voters by making them suspicious of elections and less likely to show up at the polls because they think their vote doesn’t count.
“My jackass friends in the Republican Party shoot first and ask questions later — if they ever ask them at all — and they don’t bother to check to see if there’s a reasonable explanation for why what they’re seeing is an anomaly,” said Muth, a registered Republican. “And I wish they wouldn’t because it’s just making everybody look stupid the way they’re doing it.”
Muth gave the example of 232 registered voters at the same address in Clark County.
“Immediately that’s a red flag and people cried, ‘That’s voting fraud!’ But it turned out to be a halfway house,” he said. “Once we brought that to the registrar’s attention, they went in and removed 180 of them from active to inactive” on the voter rolls.
He said his group researched the other 52 voters and found that only four had voted in the 2022 election. “There were no duplicate votes or anything like that, they were legitimate,” he said.
His Pigpen Project will investigate if it comes across anything suspicious and would submit an official election integrity violation report to the Secretary of State’s office if actual fraud were suspected.
“We haven’t come across that yet,” he said. …
Muth said his Pigpen Project has been working with Clark County’s registrar of voters and hopes to expand its voter-roll cleanup effort to include volunteers in other counties through a statewide Zoom training tentatively scheduled next month.
“We're making progress, we're being very successful in what we're doing,” he said.
His message to the RNC: “Stop this. It's not helpful. All it's doing is hurting our relationship with the election officials that are right now cooperatively working with us.”
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FAMOUS LAST WORDS
“Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.” – Seth Godin
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.