Review finds no evidence to support Nevada GOP's claims of widespread voter fraud

Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske announced on Wednesday that her office reviewed thousands of accusations of voter fraud filed by the state Republican Party and found them to be without merit.

Cegavske made the announcement in a letter to the Nevada Republican Party, in which she said her office went through 122,918 records filed by the state GOP.

“Our investigation revealed that these allegations and others are based largely upon an incomplete assessment of voter registration records and lack of information concerning the processes by which these records are compiled and maintained,” Cegavske wrote.

She added, “And while the NVGOP raises policy concerns about the integrity of mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day voter registration, these concerns do not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud.”

Among Cegavske’s findings:

• Despite what the GOP alleged, 21,142 people did not vote twice in the election. According to the report, 2,828 of the people the state Republican Party alleged to have voted twice were determined to have cast just one ballot. And the remaining  18,314 voters had “distinct differences in their names, addresses, birthdates, and other information suggesting that they are not the same person”;
• The GOP’s allegation that 1,506 dead people voted is also false. A review found 10 of the alleged dead voters “appeared questionable” and were referred for investigation to law enforcement, but they have yet to be determined to be dead voters;
•  The review also debunked the allegation that 2,479 voters were not Nevada residents. According to Cegavske’s findings, it’s “probable that many of these voters were Nevada residents during the 30-day period preceding the election”;
• And finally, the review found no evidence to support the GOP’s claim that 3,987 non-citizens voted in the 2020 election.

Nevada Republicans have been griping about Donald Trump’s loss in the state since it happened, making baseless allegations of voter fraud to try to overturn the results.

President Joe Biden carried the state by 33,596 votes, or roughly 2.5%.

In December, the Nevada Republican Party lost a legal challenge that sought to nullify Biden’s victory, with the judge writing in his opinion that the party “did not prove … that illegal votes were cast and counted that should have been rejected during the signature verification process, or legal votes were not counted that should have been accepted,” according to a report from the Associated Press.

And the party is angry at Cegavske in particular for the way she ran the election, voting earlier this month to censure her because she “put the reliability of our elections in Nevada in question,” the Nevada Independent reported.

Cegavske — the only Republican statewide elected official in the state — criticized her party for its behavior.

“Regrettably, members of my own political party have decided to censure me simply because they are disappointed with the outcome of the 2020 election,” she said in a statement to the Nevada Independent. “My job is to carry out the duties of my office as enacted by the Nevada Legislature, not carry water for the state GOP or put my thumb on the scale of democracy.

In the wake of Trump’s loss in 2020, Republicans in the Nevada state Legislature have filed at least seven pieces of legislation seeking to restrict the right to vote in the state, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice.

However, Republicans do not have a majority in either the state Senate or state Assembly, nor do they hold the governorship in Nevada, which means the voter suppression bills will likely not pass.

Instead, the Democratic-controlled Legislature is working to make it easier to vote by making permanent the state’s expansion of absentee ballots.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.