Volunteers in rural Nye County had completed their second day of counting ballots Thursday when the Supreme Court issued a three-page opinion with objections raised by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, who is in charge of elections and has been one of the GOP’s most vocal critics of the kind of voter fraud conspiracy theories that fueled the hand-counting of ballots, said that “the hand-counting process must stop immediately. .” She asked in a letter to Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf to confirm in her office Thursday night that the hand counting process “has been suspended.” Cegavske’s office did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ requests for comment. However, the ACLU said in a statement that Nye County attorneys have informed the agency’s legal staff that “the hand counting process has been closed.” “Today is a victory for everyone who believes in democracy,” said Sadmira Ramic, ALCU of Nevada Voting Rights Advocate. Nye County officials and their attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Cegavske, citing the court’s latest ruling, said in the letter that the current hand-counting process was banned at least until the polls close on November 8. She said “no alternative hand-counting process can proceed” until she and the county can determine if there are feasible alternatives that would comply with the Supreme Court’s order. In its three-page ruling Thursday night, the high court did not order a halt to the recount. But the court sided with the arguments made by the ACLU in an emergency motion filed earlier Thursday. The ACLU accused Nye County officials of violating a Supreme Court ruling issued last week that required the count to be conducted in a way that prevented the public release of early results before polls near the Nov. 8 in-person vote. The ACLU argued that reading candidates’ names aloud from ballots within earshot of public observers violates the court’s rule. Nye County attorneys said in a court filing earlier Thursday that the ACLU is engaging in “political stunts and ‘gotcha’ games.” He asked the court to distinguish between observers who verbally describe the “vote count” and observers who learn the “election results.” The high court said that “the specifics of the hand-counting process and the “positioning of the observer” in a manner consistent with its earlier order were to be “determined by Nye County and the Secretary of State.” On the first day of the count Wednesday, The Associated Press and other observers, including some from the ACLU, watched volunteers swear in and split into groups in six different rooms in a Nye County office building in Pahrump, 60 miles (96 kilometers ) west of Las Vegas. ACLU Nevada head Athar Haseebullah described on Twitter what he saw as “a disaster of a process.” Hasebullah provided additional details Thursday about an apparently armed polling station volunteer who he said led an ACLU observer out of the counting room Wednesday in an argument over whether she was improperly counting votes in a notebook. “This volunteer never pulled a firearm,” Haseebullah said, describing what he said appeared to be a gun handle visible in the woman’s waistband. “We didn’t move away from the counting area, but this volunteer pulled my team member out of the room where he was observing.” Kampf, in the county’s Superior Court filing, alleged that the anonymous ACLU observer was taking notes in violation of a court order that said observers “shall not prematurely release any information concerning the voting process.” Some teams the AP observed spent about three hours each counting 50 ballots. Ties, where all three high-ranking candidates did not have the same number of votes for a candidate, led to recounts and occasionally more recounts. On Thursday, volunteers counted 25 ballots at a time instead of 50 — a decision Kampf made in response to the difficulty of counting 50 ballots at a time. “The first day was a little rough as you can imagine, but today things are going very smoothly, a lot less telling,” Kampf told KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. After counting 900 ballots Wednesday, Kampf said his goal was to count about 2,000 ballots a day. While the county planned to count every vote by hand, it still relied on Dominion voting machines as the primary vote calculators for this election. Kampf has floated the idea of dismantling the machines in future elections. In a filing last week, the ACLU tried to block the count before Election Day, saying it threatened to reveal the election results before most voters could even weigh in. live broadcast of the count, deciding that the video can only be released after the polls close on November 8. Thursday’s new opinion came in response to the ACLU’s emergency request for “clarification” of the earlier decision. Nevada has one of the most closely watched U.S. Senate races in the country, as well as high-stakes contests for governor and the office that oversees elections. Early ballots, either in person or by mail, are usually counted mechanically on Election Day, with the results released only after the polls close. In most places, hand counts are used after elections on a limited basis to ensure that machine counts are accurate. But Nye County commissioners voted to count all ballots after complaints from residents echoed nearly two years of conspiracy theories about voting machines and false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by former President Donald Trump. Trump won 69 percent of the vote in Nye County, although President Joe Biden won Nevada by about 2.4 percent. Republican Secretary of State nominee Jim Marchand has repeated baseless election claims and said he wants to expand hand counting to every county in Nevada.
Ritter reported from Las Vegas. Sonner reported from Reno.
Stern is a member of the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative corps. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places reporters in local newsrooms to report on undercover issues. Follow Stern on Twitter: @gabesten326
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