Nevada County refuses to certify results of two local primaries

Local officials in Washoe County, Nevada, voted Tuesday against certifying the results of two recounted primary races after a prominent election denier claimed the results were fraudulent and demanded manual tallies of the results.

Robert Beadles, a supporter of former President Donald Trump who promoted election conspiracy theories, spent $150,000 to recount three local races in the June primary in Washoe County. A candidate later withdrew his request for a recount, but authorities spent days sorting through the thousands of votes cast and found a difference of two votes. – one vote in each race – this had no effect on the significant margins of victory in the remaining two races.

The three Republican commissioners on the Washoe County Board voted against certifying the two primaries — for a nonpartisan school board position and a Republican county commissioner position — while the two Democrats voted in favor.

At a meeting Tuesday, dozens of people spoke for and against certification, many of the latter demanding manual recounts rather than automatic ones.

Experts long ago discovered that manually counting votes is more expensive, more error-prone and more time-consuming than using automatic tabulators.

It is unclear what will happen now in the two primaries in question.

Bethany Drysdale, a spokeswoman for Washoe County, said county officials are deferring to Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, for next steps.

In a statement released Wednesday, Aguilar said: “This week, three county commissioners refused to tabulate accurate election results as required by law. This vote has the potential to set a dangerous precedent for elections in Nevada. It is It is unacceptable for any public official to undermine the trust of their voters.”

Washoe County, where Reno is located, is Nevada’s second-largest county, with nearly half a million residents, and has been a hotbed of voter fraud allegations despite little evidence. It is also expected to again be a key area in the swing state in this year’s presidential elections.

Cari-Ann Burgess, the county’s acting registrar of voters, said her office did all the necessary due diligence when recounting 50,000 votes.

“We looked at every part of the election again,” Burgess told commissioners Tuesday. The difference of two votes found in the recount was due to the election official’s error in discerning the voter’s intent and replicating ballots that would not be scanned on machines in a process called adjudication, she said.

Beadles spent years protesting the Washoe County elections. Reported by Reuters that a previous registrar and several employees resigned in response to harassment they experienced over their claims.

During Tuesday’s meeting, many people cited Beadles’ claim as evidence of fraud.

“The only thing you can do to fulfill your oath today is to invalidate these results and immediately schedule a new election made exclusively with hand-counted paper ballots,” said one of the school board candidates, Paul White, at the meeting, speaking against certifying the race he lost.

County Commissioner Michael Clark, a Republican, said he is “not an election denier … but I have seen a lot of mismanagement.” He later voted against certification.

The once-routine process of certifying local election results has increasingly become a venue for promoting allegations of voter fraud.

In 2022, a city council in rural Otero County, New Mexico initially refused to certify the results of the June primary. After the state Supreme Court ordered it to do so and board members were threatened with criminal charges, a commissioner agreed to reverse her vote and the results were certified.