Judge rejects another Republican ballot-counting lawsuit in Nevada

A federal judge in Las Vegas on Friday denied another Republican-backed challenge of Nevada election procedures, rejecting a legal effort that would have forced Clark County to abandon an expedited method for checking ballots and brought processing and counting to a virtual crawl.

Ruling from the bench after a two-hour hearing, U.S. District Judge Andrew Gordon rejected arguments that Clark County’s procedures had prevented a woman from lawfully voting or another man from observing the vote counting process.

More fundamentally however, Gordon, as state and federal judges have opined in at least five previous unsuccessful Republican-backed challenges to Nevada election procedures, said it was not his place to rewrite state election law nor, as a federal judge, to intervene in state election proceedings.

“The public interest is not in favor of disrupting the completion of the process and the counting of the ballots,” Gordon said.

Plaintiffs included a woman who said she was barred from voting in Clark County when her signature was found to have matched a previously received ballot. Attorneys used her experience to argue that the machine signature-checking system used by the county to do an initial comparison screening of signatures was unreliable and flawed.

The other plaintiff alleged he was barred from lawfully observing ballot counting in Clark County on Wednesday.

Plaintiffs sought an order preventing the county from using the machine signature checking and another to compel officials to allow “meaningful access” to the ballot counting process.

Clark County, responding in court papers and testimony, said that the voter who was initially turned away had had her signature visually checked by three elections officers, including County Registrar Joe Gloria.

They concurred that the signatures matched – an indication that the woman had already voted or that someone had copied her signature and done so. She was offered a chance to file a provisional ballot, standard procedure in such cases, and sign a declaration that the previously entered ballot wasn’t hers, but she declined. Instead of fixing the one ballot, she sought via her lawsuit to disrupt thousands of others.

As for the ballot watcher, who had identified himself as a member of the media but then moved to the section reserved for observers, officials said he had been barred after attempting to film the ballot counting process, which is against the rules.

The other observers “weren’t having it. They were getting on his case for trying to game this system,” Clark County Attorney Mary-Anne Miller told Gordon.

Gordon ruled that the procedures used by Clark were appropriate and there was “little to no evidence” that the signature checking machine was “not doing what it’s supposed to do.” He said plaintiffs had shown “at best” that one ballot had been improperly cast but that thousands of ballots might not be counted “because the signatures might not be able to be verified by human beings” before the deadline to canvass the vote.

Plaintiffs, Gordon said, did not present sufficient legal grounds or evidence for him to issue an order and “dictate to the Clark County elections board and folks over there how to do their jobs.”

Contact Capital Bureau reporter Bill Dentzer at bdentzer@reviewjournal.com. Follow @DentzerNews on Twitter.