Nye clerk blames ACLU for delaying hand counts

Nye County Clerk-Elect Mark Kampf blamed multiple lawsuits and legal challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union as the reason why a hand count of more than 20,000 paper ballots weren’t completed by deadline.

“We’ve learned a lot,” Kampf told KPVM-TV last week, adding that nonpartisan volunteer counters have been able to get through about 2,000 ballots each day.

Election officials had planned to count more than 13,000 mail-in ballots in the days before the polls closed in Nye County, but Kampf said they “lost 14 days” because of stop-and-go court orders that delayed the process.

While tabulations from electronic Dominion voting machines will soon be submitted to county and state election officials to certify the election, the clerk told KPVM that the hand count will continue.

“The real test is to compare our results with what the tabulator produced,” he said.

On Wednesday, more than 12,000 ballots had been counted in Nye County, Kampf reported, with 99.89 percent accuracy compared to results from electronic machines, but weren’t fininshed by the time Nye County commissioners canvassed the results on Friday.

More than 61 percent of registered voters turned out in Nye County to cast ballots in the 2022 midterm elections, according to the latest data from the county clerk’s office. Data shows 14,215 (about 42 percent) of the county’s 20,883 voters who participated in this election cast mail ballots, while 4,161 voters (about 12.3 percent) voted early at polling stations in Duckwater, Pahrump and Tonopah. The remaining 2,507 voters (about 7.4 percent) went to the polls to cast their ballots on Election Day.

Updated election results are posted on pvtimes.com.