Hand count of ballots in Nevada county draws court challenge

An unprecedented hand count of mail-in votes began for a second day in a rural Nevada county Thursday, while opponents asked the state Supreme Court to issue an immediate order to stop the process.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada filed an emergency request for action shortly after 7 a.m., just one hour before Nye County officials resumed a count that on Wednesday tallied about 900 of 1,950 mail-in votes that the county had received.

A 20-page court filing accused Nye County of violating Supreme Court rules, set last Friday, that require the count to be conducted in a way that prevents public release of early results before many voters have a chance to vote by mail, in-person early or at the polls on Nov. 8.

Nye County spokesman Arnold Knightly said he could not comment on the ACLU filing, but said the county would respond to the state high court.

The Associated Press and other observers, including some from the ACLU, watched Wednesday as morning and afternoon shifts of volunteers were sworn in and split into groups in six different rooms at a Nye County office building in Pahrump, 60 miles (96 kilometers) west of Las Vegas.

In one room, one person announced candidate names aloud, a verifier looked over her shoulder and three talliers marked sheets of paper. The daylong process, with two shifts, was slow and occasionally beset by snags.

Kampf later declared the first day a success, but ACLU Nevada executive director Athar Haseebullah called it “an embarrassing day for our democracy” and warned that “a historic disaster is brewing in Nye County.”

The state Supreme Court ruling also blocked a plan to livestream the vote-counting. Video can be released only after polls close on Nov. 8, the court said.

Rules set by the secretary of state’s office said Nye County had to split teams into separate rooms so anyone observing the count of early in-person and mailed ballots would not know the “totality of returns.” Participants were not identified for the media.

Observers were required to sign a form saying they won’t release results they overhear. Anyone who does could be charged with a gross misdemeanor.

Nye County is an old silver mining region between Las Vegas and Reno best known as the home of the nation’s vast former nuclear weapons test site. It is home to about 50,000 residents, including 33,000 registered voters.

Nevada has one of the most closely watched U.S. Senate races in the country, as well as high-stakes contests for governor and the office that oversees elections.

Two groups of five that The Associated Press observed Wednesday spent about three hours each counting 50 ballots. Mismatched tallies, where all three talliers didn't have the same number of votes for a candidate, led to recounts and occasionally more recounts.

Ballots cast early, either in-person or by mail, are typically counted by machine on Election Day, with results released only after polls close. In most places, hand counts are used after an election on a limited basis to ensure machine tallies are accurate.

However, Nye County commissioners voted to run a hand count of all its ballots after being bombarded with complaints by residents who have been subjected to nearly two years of conspiracy theories related to voting machines and false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Trump won 69% of the vote in Nye County although President Joe Biden won Nevada by about 33,500 votes.

Nye County wanted to start counting its early ballots before Election Day rather than risk missing the state’s Nov. 17 certification deadline.

Nye is the most prominent county in the U.S. to change its vote-counting process in reaction to the conspiracy theories — even though there has been no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of machines in the 2020 election, including in Nevada. The decision prompted the long-time county clerk to resign.

Kampf has described the county’s Dominion tabulator machines as a “stop-gap” measure while it decides how to handle tallies for future elections. But the machines will remain the primary recording mechanism for this election, despite the hand-counting.

“If it’s successful, and we can show that we can be effective and we learn by it, we can go to a full hand-count process,” Kampf told reporters.

The Republican nominee for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, said he wants to spread hand-counting to every county. In March, he said he would try to have the state’s 15 rural counties adopt hand-counting, then “force Clark and Washoe” — home to Las Vegas and Reno — to do so.

Marchant has repeated unsubstantiated election claims and told audiences that elections are corrupt.

Nevada’s least populous county, Esmeralda, used hand-counting to certify its primary results in June, when officials spent more than seven hours counting 317 ballots. The most populous county in the continental U.S. to rely exclusively on hand-counting is Owyhee County, Idaho, which has one-fifth the number of the registered voters as Nye County.

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Ritter reported in Las Vegas. Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Stern on Twitter: @gabestern326

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