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Election Integrity

Nevada Stands Firm on Election

In Nevada, the Trump legal team scored a significant court win that could have actually change the outcome in the blue state. From MSN:

In its first court victory, a Nevada judge has agreed to let the Trump campaign present its evidence that fraud and illegalities plagued the state’s election, enough to reverse Joe Biden’s win and set an example for other state challenges.
But that victory was short lived.

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Nevada Stands Firm on Election

My home state of Nevada became meme famous for its seemingly meticulous ballot-counting measures.

But more serious allegations began to surface and despite media claims of “no evidence” thousands of pages of testimony began to pour in.

And true to Nevada’s spirit of independence, on Thursday Judge James Todd Russell in Carson City agreed to let the Trump campaign present its evidence that fraud and illegalities plagued the state’s election, enough to reverse Joe Biden’s win and set an example for other state challenges. The plaintiffs requested a temporary injunction that would prevent Clark County from counting votes until election officials implement a “meaningful” plan for polling and ballot counting procedures to be observed, in accordance with state law.

“Transparency is paramount to ensure Nevadans the right to a free and fair election,” Nevada Republican Party Chair Michael McDonald said in a statement to the Nevada Independent. “Clark County’s refusal to allow people to observe the handling of ballots and their low standards for matching signatures should disturb all voters. It is troubling that those trusted to run our elections are going to have to be compelled by the court to follow state law and protect this election.”

Attorneys for the lawsuit earlier this week sent Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske a letter alleging that Clark County was in violation of N.R.S.293B.354 by failing to submit a plan for accommodation of members of the public to “observe delivery, counting, handling and processing of ballots.” The letter demanded that Cegavske “immediately step in and inform Clark County that a number of its current observation protocols (which were never submitted to your office for approval) are unacceptable and that Clark County must accommodate meaningful observation to assure transparency in the election process.”

After going over a number of Federal Election Laws, I’ve personally seen a number of significant violations. I’ve downloaded the complete raw data file of the over rolls which contains over 10 million entries, shows more than 3,000 voters who submitted ballots under the age of 18, and numerous other irregularities.

And despite overwhelming affidavits of fraud, and thousands of people submitting complaints that when arrived at the polls their votes had already been cast, on Friday, in a detailed, 35-page decision, Judge Russell vetted each claim of fraud and wrongdoing made by the Trump campaign in the state and found that none was supported by convincing proof.

The campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, due to voter fraud, nor in an amount equal to or greater than” Biden’s margin of victory, which was about 33,600 votes, Russell wrote.

The judge dismissed the challenge with prejudice, ruling that the campaign failed to offer any basis for annulling more than 1.3 million votes cast in the state’s presidential race.

The Nevada Supreme Court had already certified the election for Biden last month, awarding him the state’s six electoral votes. State election results reported Biden defeated Trump in Nevada by 33,596, or 2.4%. The next step in the election process, the electoral college will convene on Dec. 14.

Voter Rolls

“These numbers show how vote by mail fails,” said J. Christian Adams, PILF’s president and general counsel. “New proponents of mail balloting don’t often understand how it actually works. States like Oregon and Washington spent many years building their mail voting systems and are notably aggressive with voter list maintenance efforts. Pride in their own systems does not somehow transfer across state lines. Nevada, New York, and others are not and will not be ready for November.”

Nevada has removed the ability of citizens to audit the publically available voter rolls. In the instructions on how to create a report, the option to select “Eligible Voter List” is removed.

The quote comes from a former Nevada attorney general, Adam Laxalt, a Republican and co-chairman of the Trump campaign in Nevada is concerning if true. “It’s important to understand first and foremost, how insecure this system is. We have over 600,000 mail-in ballots that have been counted — those are votes that are official in our system. We also know that we have unclean rolls — ballots that have been mailed to dead people, to people who have moved out of state, and people that got a dozen ballots in their homes, etc,” Laxalt said.

Signature Matching

Laxalt also focused on the electronic signature matching, “We have over 200,000 of those votes have been verified by machine only,” and then quotes computer experts as saying that changes in the machine’s calibrations for comparing signatures  would “cast grave doubt on the 200,000 signatures that were verified.”

Indeed, if the machine’s sensitivity was set so low as to allow “Santa Claus” to be verified as an authentic signature, which has been spread on social media, then we do have a problem. According to MSN, “An experiment testing the veracity of Nevada mail-in ballot signature verification reportedly resulted in an 89% failure rate, raising concerns about the integrity of the state’s rapidly implemented universal mail-in ballot system.”

The result of Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Victor Joecks experiment contradicted assurances from Nevada officials that signature verification, the process of matching a voter’s signature on file to the signature on the ballot, would prevent fraudulent ballots from being counted.

A lawsuit from the Trump campaign claims that elections administrators in Clark County, which accounts for the vast majority of voters in Nevada, lowered settings on a signature verification machine so that it would accept ballots with just a 40% signature match to the one for the voter on file. Joecks experiment would seem to support that claim.

“County officials aren’t working proactively to determine whether unscrupulous actors abused this vulnerability in a widespread fashion,” Joecks wrote. “If a criminal doesn’t admit he committed voter fraud, Clark County is unlikely to find out about it. Willful ignorance isn’t an election security strategy.”

“It’s unclear how much voter fraud took place in Nevada. But it’s clear signature verification isn’t the fail-safe security check elections officials made it out to be,” he concluded.

Despite such serious concerns, a litany of shoddy lawyering has caused nearly all of Trump’s Election Integrity lawsuits to be dismissed. And while serious questions remain unanswered and procedures remain unchanged even for future elections, the Nevada Supreme Court struck down a Trump campaign lawsuit alleging widespread voter fraud and seeking to overturn the election result in a 6-0 ruling late Tuesday, dealing yet another blow to the campaign’s overwhelmingly unsuccessful post-election legal effort and likely concluding the challenges to the election results in the state, ensuring that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory will stand.

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