(Chuck Muth) – With Nevada’s primary election just weeks away, things are heating up related to the Pigpen Project’s efforts to clean up the voter files. The laws, regulations and processes required are complicated, conflicting, convoluted and in some cases totally unreasonable and without merit.
But these are the rules we’re forced to play by, so we’re playing by them as best as we can under the circumstances. I’ll report more on this as some pre-primary challenges of suspected ineligible voters are processed through the current system.
In the meantime, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an editorial today slamming legislative Democrats for a series of election-related laws that have made our elections in Nevada less secure and more open to suspicions as to their security.
Here it is in case you missed it…
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EDITORIAL: Democrats ignore election security, create distrust
National Republicans have filed two lawsuits challenging Nevada’s election laws and procedures. One of the filings alleges the state fails to maintain accurate voter rolls. Another questions the legality of counting mail ballots received after Election Day.
Democrats have naturally stepped up the criticism.
“This lawsuit is little more than political theater,” maintains a legal brief from the Democratic National Committee in the voter roll dispute, “designed less to address any real (much less substantial) issue with Nevada’s voter registration lists, than to sow public distrust in the security and integrity of our electoral systems.”
Whether or not these GOP legal salvos succeed will be determined in a court of law. But if anyone is searching for those seeking to “sow public distrust” in the election process, they might begin with the Democratic lawmakers who overhauled Nevada’s election system for partisan political ends.
You don’t have to embrace Donald Trump’s stolen election guff to recognize that many of the voting reforms which have emerged from Carson City in recent years under the guise of expanding access to the franchise have been designed with little regard for election security.
For instance, universal mail ballots — necessitating the delivery of ballots to every registered voter, whether they requested one or not — was originally imposed as an emergency pandemic measure to ensure Nevadans didn’t have to risk disease at the polls. Nevada Democrats later made the approach permanent despite photos of ballots piled up at cluster mail boxes and numerous instances of ballots being mailed to the wrong address.
Progressive lawmakers have also sanctioned ballot harvesting, under which activists may collect and return votes, obliterating any chain of custody protections. They consistently block voter ID laws. They legalized mail ballots that arrive up to four days after Election Day, even if they have no discernible postmark. They created automatic registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles without a citizenship check.
And anyone who dares question the changes is smeared as a racist advocate of voter suppression.
In fact, none of these reforms does anything to inspire public confidence in the electoral process. The fact that there’s scant evidence of widespread fraud in Nevada’s recent balloting doesn’t make the current system less susceptible to it.
Encouraging participation in the democratic process is important. But safeguards to ensure the integrity of the vote are equally vital. Nevada Democrats have swung so far toward the former for political gain that they now virtually ignore the latter. That this has created more electoral skeptics should be no surprise. If they truly seek to mitigate “public distrust” in our elections, it’s time Democratic lawmakers embraced a more balanced approach.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
“If even one vote has been illegally cast or if the integrity of just one election official is compromised, it diminishes faith in the process.” – U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams
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.