Recall irregularities abound at Registrar’s office

The Clark County registrar’s office can’t keep its numbers straight. It’s already admitted to improperly excluding 175 signers of a petition to recall state Sen. Joyce Woodhouse. Now, evidence suggests it’s made hundreds of more mistakes in that recall and the one targeting state Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro.

Not a good look for the largest county elections department in Nevada.

The fights over the recalls have been fierce. But as recently as last month, the lines were clear. Recalls supporters had gathered enough signatures to qualify if opponents couldn’t count withdrawal forms turned in after the recall’s submission. Per state law, the Clark County registrar’s office had used a random sampling to determine the percentage of valid signatures. The office even changed the number of valid signatures on the Woodhouse petition in November, but it still qualified.

The fight went to court. In March, District Judge Jerry Wiese ordered the registrar’s office to manually check all the signatures. Two weeks ago, the office made an unexpected announcement: The percentage of valid recall signatures had decreased significantly. The Woodhouse petition dropped from 85 percent to 80 percent, according to registrar reports. Suddenly, neither recall had enough signatures to go forward, even if post-submittal withdrawals didn’t count.

Billy Rogers, president of Advanced Micro Targeting, the group that collected the signatures, started looking into the registrar’s office work. Members of his team found hundreds of errors. With just days to go before a court hearing on Wednesday, they flagged 335 improper exclusions — just those that were easy to identify. The office then acknowledged that it had made 175 mistakes. That left the Woodhouse petition just 21 signatures short of qualifying, excluding post-submission withdrawals.

“I have never seen — in all my years of doing this — an elections department that has changed the number four times. Never,” said Rogers. “Bottom line is I’ve never seen a random sample come in that far off. I have never ever, and I’m not young.”

Rogers is no stranger to signature gathering. His company has collected a million signatures around the country in the past two years alone. He even employs a former FBI handwriting expert. Rogers’ team identified 96 additional errors. This included people whose signatures were rejected during the random sample but who later signed declarations saying they had signed the recall.

“We talked with 71 percent of the people whose signature was rejected during random verification, and they all signed declarations under penalty of perjury that they signed it,” said Rogers.

The registrar’s office then stopped looking into mistakes, even though it had more than a full day before the court hearing.

“Every time they’ve made an error, it disenfranchises eligible voters who sign the petition,” said Rogers.

Rogers’ team started to look at the Cannizzaro numbers but found that the registrar’s office returned 400 petition books with mismatched pages. Rogers said the registrar’s office blamed a “paper jam.”

“I’d just like to know we got a fair (shake with the) county, whatever it turns out to be,” said Rogers. “Everything I’ve seen in this process tells me they haven’t been up to the job.”

Registrar Joe Gloria may have answers to these irregularities, but his office said he wasn’t available until next week. A department spokesperson suggested some of the shift came from an increase in the number of duplicate signers found through a full verification. County spokesman Dan Kulin put the difference between random sampling and verification at around 2.5 percent, based in part on the county incorrectly using different denominators to determine percent.

“You can’t have a system where the returns are so different and expect to inspire any kind of confidence,” said Rogers.

You may or may not agree with the recalls, but you should be curious to find out why the registrar’s numbers keep changing.

Listen to Victor Joecks discuss his columns each Monday at 9 a.m. with Kevin Wall on 790 Talk Now. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.