The Nevada primary has come and gone, but some residents were aghast to find they had voted in this contest even though they didn’t participate. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that voters noticed irregularities in their voter histories on February 18. The state said it was a system glitch, which they hope to resolve soon. They were clear that it had nothing to do with tabulations but the code that identifies Nevada voters and mail-in ballots that aren’t returned (via Las Vegas Review-Journal):
A bunch of people who lie about everything told me in 2020 this was impossible. https://t.co/srsaVWfjeU
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 20, 2024
After numerous Nevada voters saw irregularities in their voter history on Sunday, the secretary of state’s office said it has identified the issues and is fixing them, according to a statement Monday evening.
The office learned Sunday there were possible technical issues relating to Nevadans’ voting history for people who did not participate in the Feb. 6 presidential primary. It said elections and IT staff began working immediately with county clerks and registrars Monday morning.
It determined that the problem resulted in some counties not taking the proper steps to upload their voter registration. Every night each county uploads their voter registration to the secretary of state’s database, which executes code to create the statewide voter registration file that Nevadans see when they log into vote.nv.gov, according to the secretary of state’s office.
[…]
Las Vegas resident and registered Republican Daphne Lee said she and her family checked the secretary of state’s website on Sunday to see their voter history after she heard from a few people that their voting history was incorrect. The site showed that she and her family’s mail-in ballots were counted for the primary, even though none of them participated in the election. She tried to opt out of future mail-in ballots and was met with a message saying she was not currently registered to vote, and her voting history no longer existed.
“It’s just so frustrating,” Lee said in a phone interview. “This makes everyone uncomfortable.”
For the state officials trying to fix this mess, how do you reconcile saying, “This is an error that relates to the code used for when a voter is sent a mail ballot and does not return it; it has no connection in any way to vote tabulation,” and then people alleging the ballots they never mailed in were counted. It sounds like that’s more than a technical glitch, no?
I’m not going DEFCON 1 here because the Republican primary never mattered. Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, and Tim Scott were the only participants in that worthless exercise in which Haley couldn’t beat “none of these candidates” in a humiliating blow to her 2024 campaign. Donald Trump won all the state’s delegates two days later, with 99 percent of caucus-goers supporting a return of the MAGA train. Still, the fact that scores of GOP voters took the time to vote for no one should have the Haley campaign drafting some honorable exit, but I doubt that.
Still, this is not a little problem; it speaks to election integrity. It’s mundane, but keeping proper records and making sure people who haven’t voted aren’t counted is—I don’t know—pretty important.
