The Nevada chapter of the ACLU this week filed a lawsuit against Nye County in an effort to halt its new hand-counting of ballots in November’s election.
The suit comes after some Nye officials spent months embracing false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
State of Nevada contributor and commentator John L. Smith has been following the story.
"It's clear that the ACLU believes that Nye County is basically a test in Nevada, as they're observing all over the country, essentially people who believe that 2020 election was stolen, and have embarked on an attempt to basically take over election departments in Nye County," he said.
The county is home to just a few thousand voters, mostly conservative. Despite claims, there were no signs of voter fraud in the county.
"The legal argument being made is that this was basically pushed through by an all-Republican county commission without essentially any actual evidence or facts of incompetence, or wrongdoing or cheating, no voter fraud," Smith said.
The ACLU believes hand-counting could result in the early release of election results and information that would violate state law. They also believe the new law violates the Help America Vote Act, which helps Americans with disabilities cast ballots.
"It's not illegal to have hand counting in Nevada, but according to the litigation to rush it through ... is really where the problems start," Smith said.
Have voting machines been a problem in Nevada?
"The answer is no. In Nye County, as I stated before, this is a majority, vast majority Republican-voting county. Its votes followed the votes of Republican counties across the country. They were very heavily in favor of former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. The Nye County Clerk Sam Merlino actually retired after being put under pressure from people who could not accept the fair and free election results that occurred. And she said that there were no problems with the voting machines. Any argument to the contrary just lacked factual sense. They kept the voting machines locked away when they weren't being used. No one tampered with them ... there were no black helicopters that flew over and changed the coding on the computers, there's just no sign of fraud. However, that's not good enough. When you're not accepting the results of an election and in Nye County, the county commission entertained other thoughts and decided to make a change."
How is this playing in Tonopah and Pahrump?
"I think there's a lot of support among activists for this because I think it's beyond the true believer set that actually buys into the fraud issue, and that kind of fallacy. They also know it's good for their politics if they can drive down the number of voters who turn out and can start to question ballots that are cast and get ballots potentially thrown out, then that's to their advantage.
What makes this so nonsensical, is that we're talking about Nye County, we're not talking about Clark County, which has a majority democratic voter bloc, and a lot of nonpartisans in Nye County, it's pretty much all Republican all the time. And other counties in rural Nevada are very similarly situated. Esmeralda County, just up the road, home of Goldfield. It had a hand count in the primary, but of course Goldfield and Esmeralda county only has a few hundred voters. So you're not talking about big numbers, this idea of a hand count could never go forward. Even if it were approved, it could never go forward in Washoe County, or Clark County, or even Elko County, which has thousands of voters to consider. So it hasn't gone forward in in those counties."
John L. Smith, contributor, State of Nevada
