One of the nation’s high-profile maximum efforts through Trump’s Republicans to avoid using computers to mark polls in the 2022 midterm elections and instead counting votes by hand is collapsing.
Less than two days after Nye County, Nevada, began a questionable manual count led by an acting county clerk denying the 2020 election, the Nevada Supreme Court and Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske issued consecutive orders due Thursday, Oct. 1, 2020. 27. , halting the operation until after election day, 8 November.
The double orders focused heavily on a manual counting procedure that acting secretary Mark Kampf created this fall and debuted Wednesday, Oct. 26. On the first day, only 50 ballots were counted by hand. They were cast through voters, suggesting that a full count would not be completed earlier than established by state law.
Most of Nye County’s electorate is located in its southern part, near Las Vegas. This location makes Nye County a potentially rotating district in one of the battleground states of 2022.
Many races across the state of Nevada and Congress are very close, according to polls, adding seats now held by Democrats. These come with a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives. U. S. Senate seatU. S.
The Nevada Supreme Court’s order accepted an emergency petition filed through the ACLU Nevada on Oct. 27 that argued the counting procedure violated another state election law requiring vote counting to remain secret until after Election Day.
The procedure created by Kampf, which prompted the ACLU to sue last October, had two other people reading aloud the possible choices the electorate made on their ballots, and three others counting the results. When manual counting began Oct. 26, six groups counted 50 ballots and nearby observers, as well as ACLU lawyers, listened to the electorate’s possible options. Observers also witnessed counting errors, forcing groups to count votes multiple times.
The Nevada Supreme Court said reading aloud the effects violated state law and ordered the county to stop it immediately. He also ordered the county and the secretary of state to expand the manual counting procedure that would begin after Election Day on Nov. 8.
“Observers cannot be located to be aware of voting options and room counting,” the Oct. 27 court order said. “The main points of the manual counting procedure and the positioning of observers not to violate this mandate in our minds through respondents and the Nevada Secretary of State. “
However, the Secretary of State’s rebuke implies that the state and county disagree on a proper manual counting process.
“Nye County’s existing manual counting procedure will have to be stopped without delay and can only resume after polls close on November 8, 2022,” Cegavske’s Oct. 27 letter read. “In addition, no other manual counting procedure can take a position until the Secretary of State and Nye County can if there are ‘details of manual counting procedure and observer positioning’ that do not ‘violate [the Supreme Court’s] mandate]. “
The issues in between the two orders are the only issues clouding Nye County’s handling of the 2022 general election.
In the 2020 presidential election, about three-quarters of the county’s electorate supported Donald Trump. In late 2019, Nye County supervisors declared the county a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” its citizens can only bring guns into public buildings.
On Oct. 26, a poll worker armed with a gun attempted to confiscate notes taken through an ACLU observer. This incident is not the subject of orders from the State Supreme Court and the Secretary of State.
There are other problems. Voting Booth visited several early voting sites in other rural Nevada counties. These counties, which are less populated than Nye County, gave the impression of having far more site-compatible electronic voting stations than Nye County, where Kampf opposed the use of voting computers.
How the improper deployment of electoral fabrics will affect county voter turnout is an open question whose impact remains to be seen.
This article was produced through Voting Booth, an assignment from the Independent Media Institute.
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