NORTH LAS VEGAS — Protesters in a “Stop the Steal” rally outside Clark County’s Board of Elections office in Nevada were generally prepared to accept the results of the election if President Trump loses to Joe Biden, as long as claims of fraud, irregularities, and foul play are investigated in earnest.
But they don’t have a lot of confidence in officials taking their concerns seriously, adding to the general frustration.
Egged on by Trump’s promise to mount legal challenges to election results, around 200 protesters swarmed the Clark County election office for the third consecutive night of protests on Friday. They don’t think that news media projections of Biden victories should be trusted and are awaiting challenges to “illegal votes.”
A federal judge on Friday blocked a Trump campaign attempt to invalidate the use of a machine that validated voter signatures on mail-in ballots.
The protesters did not have hard proof of fraud or foul play, but they have a suspicion based on anecdotal evidence and vulnerabilities in a recently overhauled system.
Nevada lawmakers in August changed the law to send every registered voter a mail-in ballot, resulting in hoards of ballots being sent to old addresses or to deceased people.
One woman said her mother in Boulder City experienced that issue: “The two ladies that she bought her home from, she got ballots for them to vote this year. They’ve been dead for over four or five years.”
While those who said they erroneously received them did not commit fraud by trying to cast the ballots, they’re not confident that others illegally returned them on behalf of another voter.
Some of the protesters’ claims have been debunked or have nothing to do with the state of Nevada, but local elections administrators aren’t going out of their way to explain tech glitches or systems to the public.
A top complaint among voters is that Nevada’s secretary of state website and a BallotTrax website used to track mail-in ballot status does not show accurate or updated information. Voters at the protest and on social media said that the website told them that “you are not currently eligible to vote” or “you have no voting history records in the voter registration database,” even if they are indeed eligible or have voted in previous elections.
“My friends, family, employees, coworkers, are all casting ballots, and it says they didn’t vote,” said Ashley Davis, 29. “We’ve tracked it on the BallotTrax, on SOS, and nothing has been tracked. It says they’ve never voted.”
One of those people, she said, is a registered Democrat who had not voted in 2008 but voted for Trump in 2020.
“The election department had no answer whatsoever,” she said.
In a statement, the Nevada Secretary of State’s office said that voters’ 2020 information might not be updated on the elections website due to delays in receiving updates from county election boards, and varying systems mean the quality of information might vary from county to county or voter to voter.
Joe Gloria, the registrar of voters for Clark County where the overwhelming majority of Nevada voters reside, said in a press conference on Friday that vote history will not be updated in his system until after the official canvass of ballots on Nov. 16.
Other system hiccups aggravated voters.
Joe Eccles, a truck driver, said that when he voted in person, poll workers told him that the system showed he had already sent in a mail-in ballot, even though he had not. He said that he had to sign an affidavit pledging that he did not send in a mail-in ballot.
In a Saturday press conference, Gloria said his office has been receiving reports of fraud.
“We do have some reports that have come in that we’re logging for reporting. But we’re definitely going to do an investigation, and we’ll deal with them once the canvass is finished,” Gloria said. “The votes are in the system at this point, so we’ll have to after the election, post-election, go after anything that’s been reported at this time.”
The Associated Press, Fox News, and other outlets called Nevada for Biden on Saturday, and every major decision desk on Saturday projected that Biden would gain the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
