Nevada finds no evidence of election fraud, despite GOP claims

CARSON CITY — Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, whose pushback on her own party’s allegations of massive voter fraud in the November election prompted her official party censure, said Wednesday her office’s just-completed review of the election found no evidence for the state GOP’s claims.

The investigation of the GOP’s complaint filed in early March “revealed that these allegations and others are based largely upon an incomplete assessment of voter registration records and lack of information concerning the processes by which these records are compiled and maintained,” said Deputy Secretary for Elections Mark Wlaschin in a letter on behalf of Cegavske released Wednesday.

The state party initially filed a complaint with nearly 123,000 individual records of alleged fraud. Cegavske’s office initially whittled that number down to less than 4,000, many of them already under investigation by her office.

While the state GOP “raises policy concerns about the integrity of mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day voter registration, these concerns do not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud,” Wlaschin wrote in a letter accompanying an 11-page detailed report of the office’s findings.

As Republicans have done nationwide, the Nevada GOP has continued to claim without evidence that widespread voter fraud swung the outcome in the presidential race to Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump. Biden won the state by 33,000 votes, or 2.4 percentage points.

The Trump campaign and its allies filed multiple post-election lawsuits seeking to challenge the outcome on various grounds, all of which were eventually dismissed or withdrawn. The party then filed four boxes of complaints to the Secretary of State’s office in March containing 122,918 individual complaints.

The office’s initial review reduced that number to 3,963, many of them already under review by state elections officials and law enforcement.

That number represents about 0.2 percent of the more than 1.8 million Nevadans who voted in November.

Among the allegations the Secretary of State’s office refuted:

■ 3,987 noncitizens voted. Retracing the state GOP’s steps, the office requested state drivers license records, but the “generalized information” was inconclusive and could not be substantiate the allegations.

■ 2,479 voters moved to another state or foreign country in the month preceding the election. The office found that while nearly 1,900 of those voters cast ballots in 2020, it was “probable that many of these voters were Nevada residents during the 30-day period preceding the election.”

■ 21,142 people voted twice. The office confirmed that 2,828 of those voters cast just one ballot. The remaining 18,314 pairs of votes had “distinct differences in their names, addresses, birthdates, and other information suggesting that they are not the same person.”

■ 1,506 dead people voted. The office contacted the state Office of Vital Statistics and identified 10 of 1,506 as being deceased. Those 10 were referred to law enforcement for investigation.

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

Secretary of State letter by Las Vegas Review-Journal on Scribd