Voter File Clean-Up in Nevada: Houston, We Have a Problem

(Chuck Muth) – The practical extent of my legal knowledge comes from a scene in the movie “A Few Good Men.”

In it, Tom Cruise and Demi Moore play Navy lawyers defending two Marines over an incident at Guantanamo Bay.  In the scene, Moore asks Cruise if he believes the pair are innocent.

“It doesn't matter what I believe,” Cruise shoots back.  “It only matters what I can prove.”

That’s been the guiding principle of our Pigpen Project to clean up the voter rolls in Nevada.  It doesn’t matter what we might suspect or believe; only what we can prove.

Which is why, when we launched this project, we didn’t just assume from our data research that certain voters had moved out of state.

Instead, our Project Director, Iris Stone, sent volunteer “boots on the ground” to test some of those addresses and CONFIRM that they’d moved. This is how we proved our data was reliable.

That’s the difference between making wild, unsubstantiated allegations and actually doing the hard work to prove them.

Which brings me to last week’s announcement that over 90,000 voters had been moved off the “Active” voter rolls in Clark County alone.

Now, I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on election law here, but it’s important to demonstrate exactly what we’ve been up against and why it’s so difficult and complicated to fix the voter list problem.

So here goes…

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) requires that each state “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters by reason of the death of the registrant or a change in the residence of the registrant.”

Well, there’s problem #1 right there.

Those of you who remember the mid-1990s will recall that former President Bill Clinton challenged what the meaning of “is” is.  And with that in mind, what’s the definition of “reasonable”?

Your definition and mine might not be the same as any given judge.  Which is one of the reasons GOP lawsuits accusing election officials of violating the NVRA have fallen flat.

The truth is election officials – at least here in Nevada – have passed the “reasonable” test by deploying regular “routine list maintenance” mailings after elections to voters whose ballots were returned by the post office as undeliverable.

However, it’s been our belief that this “routine list maintenance” process has been missing thousands of ineligible voters.

But again, it doesn’t matter what we “believe.” So we set out to prove it.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported this week that, according to information provided by the Nevada Secretary of State’s office, “156,996 notices were sent to registered voters seeking an address confirmation” shortly after the June primary.

In addition, on July 29, 2024, the Pigpen Project submitted 3,955 test “challenges” to various Nevada county clerks/registrars of voters.

These reports, according to the United States Post Office and official government voter files in other states, are of voters who have apparently moved out of Nevada and registered to vote in another state.

So we bounced our list of challenged voters against the newly-updated list of voters to see if they’d had their status changed after the “routine list maintenance” mailing.

And guess what?

According to an initial report by Dan Burdish – our project’s data analyst – of the 3,955 official challenges we filed, only 480 have had a change of status after the “routine list maintenance” mailings.

If only 480 of the voters we challenged had a change of status through the “routine list maintenance” process, that means 3,475 voters somehow fell through the cracks.

So we’ve now PROVED that something’s broken in Nevada’s current list maintenance process.  Houston, we have a problem.

And while the current system may qualify as a “reasonable effort” in order to comply with the LETTER of the NVRA law, that doesn’t mean it complies with the SPIRIT of the law, which was specifically passed “to ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained.”

It’s also important to note that our “test” challenges were based on official government records from only 15 other states for which we have access to voter registration data.

Which means the actual problem in Nevada is likely much bigger and includes thousands of voters still on our voter lists who are ineligible due to moving to another state and registering to vote there.

And that doesn’t even include the tens of thousands more who the post office says have moved but have not re-registered in their new states.

We’ll continue moving forward with efforts to prove all of this because it’s not just about removing voters from the voter files to save taxpayers money by not mailing ballots to ineligible voters – though that’s certainly an important consideration.

It’s about PROTECTING voters who have moved out of state from being accused of committing voting fraud if their Nevada mail-in ballot is obtained and voted by someone else illegally.

And yes, we’ve already identified one such “test” case and filed an Election Integrity Violation Report with the Secretary of State’s office.

We don’t yet know if the voter actually voted twice illegally or if someone obtained their Nevada mail-in ballot and voted it illegally.

This is probably the biggest challenge we face in trying to clean up Nevada’s voter files.  Every time you peel off one layer of the onion, there’s another new one right behind it. But we ARE making progress.

Thank you for your continued support!

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

“Mass vote by mail requires highly accurate voter rolls. Otherwise, ballots end up at the wrong addresses and some people are even sent multiple ballots under slightly different versions of their name.” – J. Christian Adams, president, Public Interest Legal Foundation

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.