Nevada county defends vote hand-count after ACLU lawsuit
As the ACLU and others have pointed out, it should come as no surprise that county registrars are trying to cover their tracks. For starters, a state law dating to 1918 gives them the authority to count paper ballots, including mail-in ballots. (To the extent that their actions violate federal law, I’m sure the county will try to argue that the error is not their own, but rather that of the federal-level election officials. To the extent, however, that they’re counting ballots illegally, they are, indeed, breaking the law; the federal government should be looking into them.)
In the meantime, it’s perfectly legal for the Nevada secretary of state to give the county registrars the authority to count ballots they don’t have, if they so decide, without any input from the county. As the ACLU points out:
If registrars were going to let the county clerk count ballots that should never be counted in the first place, there would be no reason for them to be in charge of election day. So why would they let the clerk count ballots that were never counted? And why would they let county clerks count ballots that were never even issued to voters?
The county clerk’s job is to run the process, and to send official records of the vote to the state, not to count the ballots. The Nevada secretary of state’s job is to count the ballots, not to approve the counting of ballots in the first place. The secretary of state would be in the perfect position to take control of the process, which is why he’s so active in the process.
The most likely answer is that the secretary of state doesn’t know what the county clerk is counting, and therefore has no reason to intervene.
The U.S. Senate is considering a bill that would restore voting rights for about a hundred thousand felons. A majority of the U.S. Senate, including some Republicans, are trying to make it an overwhelming bipartisan bill.
It’s a good bill, the first major attempt to address issues of voter fraud since the 2008 election, in which the vote was actually stolen from the Democrats in many states. The problem with restoring voting rights to certain felons is that it is a one-size-fits-all proposal. It is not easy to identify people who should