State again rejects Nye County vote hand-counting plan

The Nevada secretary of state’s office refused to approve a revised proposal from the interim Nye County clerk that is seeking to hand count ballots before Election Day, citing “significant risks” and “concerns relating to the integrity of the election.”

In a letter sent Friday to interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf, the secretary of state’s office laid out three key concerns that it said need to be addressed to bring it in compliance with a state Supreme Court directive before they would approve the plan.

The letter, written by Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin, said that Kampf’s plan for three talliers to work in silence instead of reading the ballot aloud and to tally each side of the ballot individually would be problematic because those talliers might not notice if the other workers mark one of the ballots, either purposefully on by accident. An extra mark on a ballot may be deemed an “over-vote,” which would lead to that vote not being counted.

Wlaschin also said in the letter that the plan had no requirements to use medical-style gloves to mitigate the risk of cheating or accidental markings and that there needed to be more detail on the county’s plan to deal with discrepancies that may pop up between the machine and hand counts.

“These significant risks must be addressed prior to the approval of your plan,” Wlaschin wrote.

Kampf submitted his revised plan to Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s office on Wednesday, just under a week after Cegavske had ordered Kampf to cease the hand-count until Election Day. Cegavske’s decision came after the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that Nye’s original counting method utilized last week violated rules they had set to prevent the county from allowing election results to be disclosed early.

Reached by phone Friday evening, Kampf said that he had already made the requested changes to the plan and resubmitted it to the secretary of state’s office.

But Kampf said he does not anticipate being able to restart the hand count before Election Day on Tuesday.

“I don’t see that happening just from a logistics point of view, but we will start s soon as we can to fulfill the requirements they’ve established,” Kampf said.

Kampf also said that Nye will not be able to hand count every ballot before the deadline for the county to canvass the vote on Nov. 18.

“We won’t be able to do that, I don’t believe. But that won’t affect the results that we will be publishing for the approved count process that includes the machine tabulation,” he said.

Nye County commissioners voted earlier this year to hand-count all ballots, a move that had been presented to them by former Assemblyman Jim Marchant, a Republican running for secretary of state this year who has been pushing conspiracy theories related to voting machines and false claims that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election but had it stolen from him.

That decision pushed longtime Nye County Clerk Sam Merlino to retire before her term ended. Kampf, who won the Republican primary for the clerk job in June, was appointed as interim clerk and vowed to fulfill the commissioners’ request to ditch voting machines.

Trump won 69 percent of the votes in Nye County, a heavily-Republican county with roughly 34,000 registered voters. Election officials across Nevada, including rural Republican county clerks and Cegavske, have said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Contact Colton Lochhead at clochhead@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ColtonLochhead on Twitter.