Nevada secretary of state finds no ‘evidentiary support’ for GOP election fraud claims

Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske‘s office told the state Republican Party on Wednesday that an investigation had found no “evidentiary support” for its allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“And while the NVGOP 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,” said the letter, addressed to the Nevada Republican Party.

Cegavske, the only statewide Republican office holder, said in the letter that elections staff had inventoried and labeled four boxes of materials that had been delivered to the state Capitol on March 4 — and then to her office — and had investigated the accompanying allegations of voter fraud.

Of the 122,918 records to support the accompanying allegations filed by members of the Nevada GOP, Cegavske’s office narrowed down the list of unique “Election Integrity Violation Reports” to 3,963, some of which were already under investigation. An accompanying report fleshed out why many of the complaints were unsubstantiated.

The Nevada GOP filed almost 4,000 complaints about noncitizens voting. But the investigative report noted that “the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as U.S. Courts of Appeal in the Ninth Circuit and elsewhere, have ruled that election officials cannot lawfully require documentary proof of citizenship as a condition of voter registration. Nevada law is consistent with federal law in this regard.”

As for allegations that voters who didn’t live in Nevada received mail-in ballots, the state concluded there were so many ways a voter might still be qualified as a permanent resident while living out of state that it wasn’t cost effective to continue to track down the information.

Among the complaints still being investigated is one against members of the Nevada Native Vote Project for violating state and federal law involving some form of payment to influence a voter. The state is also investigating 10 cases of deceased people voting, and the secretary’s office forwarded 10 cases of double voting to law enforcement out of 18,314 such complaints filed by the Nevada GOP.

The report bolsters the consensus of election experts that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada or any other US state during the 2020 election.

Despite this, Republican state lawmakers across the country have echoed former President Donald Trump’s voting conspiracy theories and, in some cases, advanced new election bills that disproportionately affect Democratic voters.

Earlier this month, Cegavske was censured by the Nevada Republican Party for “disregard of her oath of office by failing to investigate election fraud, her dismissive public statements regarding election integrity concerns, and her failure to ensure compliance with Nevada and federal election law, these actions being at least partially causal in November 2020 election irregularities and fraud.”

Cegavske rebuked her censure and the unfounded allegations that fueled it in a statement, asserting: “My job is to carry out the duties of my office as enacted by the Nevada Legislature, not carry water for the state GOP or put my thumb on the scale of democracy.”

“Unfortunately, members of my own party continue to believe the 2020 general election was wrought with fraud — and that somehow I had a part in it — despite a complete lack of evidence to support that belief,” she said.