State official offers insight into how Nevada protects its elections

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Steve Marcus

Envelopes for rejected ballots are shown at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas Thursday, May 26, 2022.

Fri, May 27, 2022 (2 a.m.)

Dead people voting. Machines being hacked. Unregistered voters casting ballots. People voting multiple times.

Clark County ElectionDepartment Tour

Clark County election workers run tests on high-speed ballot scanners at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas Thursday, May 26, 2022. Launch slideshow »

These claims of election fraud, fueled by then-President Donald Trump and his supporters after his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, have become a rallying cry for many Republicans.

Nevada election officials say they have thoroughly looked into GOP claims, spending more than 125 hours investigating, and found no evidence to support widespread fraud.

“While the NVGOP raises policy concerns about the integrity of mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day voter registration,” wrote Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske in a 2021 letter to the Nevada Republican Party about her office’s investigation, “these concerns do not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud.”

With the June 14 primary election on the horizon — when Republican and Democratic voters will determine their party’s nominees for major federal and state offices, and where all voters can participate in the nonpartisan races, such as judges, mayors and school board members — the Sun spoke with Mark Wlaschin, the deputy secretary of state for elections in the Nevada secretary of state’s office, to answer questions on voters’ minds as they wait for their ballots.

Some of those include: Will my vote count? Where does my ballot go? How does Nevada’s electoral process work?”

“It’s mind blowing and nonstop how much disinformation is out there,” Wlaschin said. Sometimes people get confused about the differences in laws state-to-state, he said. They might hear something that happens in one state but not realize Nevada operates differently.

Where does my ballot come from, and once I mail it in, what happens to it?

Each county maintains its voter rolls, with a list of the registered voters, Wlaschin said. Those county voter registration lists feed into the statewide log nightly. When it comes time for the ballots to go out, ballots are mailed only sent to active registered voters.

Those names of the registered voters are provided to a vendor who creates, prints and ships the ballot to voters, Wlaschin said.

Early voting starts Saturday, with ballots already in the mail, Wlaschin said.

Once your ballot comes in the mail, you’ll see a barcode on the envelope, Wlaschin said. When it’s scanned, it reflects you as a registered voter.

What happens if you get a ballot in your mailbox that only includes nonpartisan races because you’re a registered nonpartisan, but you decide you want to affiliate with a major party and vote in the primary election?

Wlaschin explained: You can call your clerk or go online to change your party affiliation. The election management system will immediately cancel the barcode on the envelope of the ballot that was already sent to you, and it will send you a new one.

Once you get the new ballot in the mail, you fill it out and mail that envelope back in with your ballot inside. The first thing that your county election official is going to do is scan the barcode on the envelope, which identifies you and immediately flags you as having cast a ballot in the election.

“That’s an extremely important step in the process and a major part of the security as it moves along to keep people from trying to vote twice,” Wlaschin said.

Then your ballot goes through the next step in the process: signature verification, in which the clerk registrar will compare the signature on the envelope to the signature in the voter registration database to make sure they match.

“If there’s any question at all, then that ballot gets set aside and goes to a signature curing process,” Wlaschin said.

The signature verification systems are the responsibility of the clerk or registrar. Clark County uses an Agilis machine made by Runbeck, a national election services company based in Phoenix.

The Agilis machine has a setting where the election official puts the mail ballot into the machine, and it automatically compares that signature to the signatures on file, Wlaschin said. When the machine is in doubt, it spits the ballot back out for humans to verify.

In the 2020 election cycle, for instance, the machine rejected 70% of the ballots, Wlaschin said, meaning it identified the ballots as “questionable” and asked humans to verify them.

The machine is smart enough to recognize when a signature has been printed onto a piece of paper, such as if you try to print out a signature onto a ballot.

If the machine has some doubts about your signature and spits your ballot out, the election officials will reach out to you as a voter and say, “I’ve got questions about your signature. You need to contact us,” Wlaschin said. It will be through a text, an email, a letter or a postcard depending on where you live.

They’ll look at your previous signatures that are on file and compare. In 2020, election officials compared the signatures with those from the Department of Motor Vehicles, Wlaschin said. But overtime, as you continue to vote by mail and each signature is scanned and added into your voter registration, officials verifying your signature will have more signatures on file to compare your current one to, Wlaschin said.

If you do not get in touch with your clerk’s office when they’re trying to conduct the signature cure process, your ballot is not counted, Wlaschin said. The ballot will be scanned to show you’ve cast a ballot, but it is placed on pause until the signature curing process is completed.

“That’s such a major gate that the ballot essentially passes through, so to speak,” Wlaschin said.

Once the signature verification process is complete, the ballot envelope will be separated from the ballot. After that, there’s no longer a way to identify who cast a certain ballot, as secrecy to the ballot is extremely important, Wlaschin said. From there, the ballot goes on to the normal tabulation process.

You can track your mail-in ballot at https://nevada.ballottrax.net/voter/.

What are “active” and “inactive” voters? How do I know I’m active?

An inactive voter is someone the clerk’s office doesn’t have a verifiable address on record for, Wlaschin said. Perhaps you moved, and the mail the clerk’s office sent goes unanswered. Make sure your voter registration is updated with your current address.

People can help make sure the voter rolls are up to date by writing “return to sender, not at this address” when they get election mail for people who no longer live there, Wlaschin said.

Nevada is a transient state, Wlaschin said, and folks move around quite a bit.

“This is going to be a continuing thing that Nevadans collectively need to be aware of and can be extremely helpful in taking this important role in,” Wlaschin said.

Don’t know what your voter registration is? Visit https://www.nvsos.gov/votersearch/.

I want to vote in person. How secure are the voting machines? Are they hooked up to the internet?

Part of the voting systems are “air gapped,” meaning they are not connected to the internet, Wlaschin said. Other parts, however, are connected to the internet.

When you go check in at the polling location, you go up to a polling book, which is hooked up to the internet, Wlaschin said.

“It’s important that it’s connected to the internet because that’s what keeps someone from voting in one location and running down the street to the next one and trying to vote there as well,” Wlaschin said. “It updates in real time.”

The actual voting machines — Clark County uses Dominion voting systems — are not connected to the internet. .

When you walk up in Clark County to cast your vote on the “direct reporting equipment,” your vote is recorded in four different locations: on an internal hard drive, on two devices on the back of the machine that look like USB thumb drives, and on the voter verifiable paper audit trail itself, which is what the voter sees, Wlaschin said.

Dominion voting machines are used widely across the country and in 2020 were the target of GOP claims that the machines are rigged. But the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Despite no evidence of the voting machines being compromised, former President Donald Trump’s allies continue to insist that electronic voting machines were rigged and argue for a return to paper ballots. Several county commissions in Nevada have even made that push.

Election officials from both parties told Reuters that moving to paper ballots would make voting less secure, as electronic voting machines provide more fraud safeguards by reducing human errors and preventing delays that “could be exploited by bad actors seeking to block the certification of results.”

How is someone prevented from casting multiple ballots?

Let’s use an example of someone sending in their completed mail ballot and then going to a poll to try to vote again. Once the mail ballot arrives at the county clerk’s office or the county election department, the envelope will be electronically scanned and flagged, and that second ballot will not count, Wlaschin said.

Every step of that person’s actions is recorded, from checking in at the polling location to the scan of the exterior of their mail ballot envelope with their signature, is captured and set aside for law enforcement to investigate, Wlaschin said.

Voting more than once in an election is punishable by a prison term of up to four years and a fine of up to $5,000.

Wlaschin urges anyone who hears something “funky” about the electoral process, or if they have any questions, to reach out at [email protected] or call the secretary of state’s office at 702-684-5705.

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