The Nevada secretary of state’s office on Friday approved regulations for counties to hand count votes starting as soon as this fall’s midterm elections.
But the revised regulations will no longer apply to the one county that has been at the forefront of the drive to count by hand.
That’s because Nye County, in the desert between Las Vegas and Reno, will also use a parallel tabulation process alongside its hand count, using the same machines that are typically used to count mail-in ballots. All ballots in Nye County will resemble mail-in ballots, interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf said in an interview earlier this month.
Nye County is one of the first jurisdictions nationwide to act on election conspiracies related to mistrust in voting machines. Nevada’s least populous county, Esmeralda, used hand-counting to certify June’s primary results, when officials spent more than seven hours counting 317 ballots cast.
The long-time Nye County clerk resigned in July after election conspiracies led to a successful push to hand count votes.
Kampf, her replacement, has falsely claimed that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. He has vowed to bring hand counting to the rural county of about 50,000, alongside the parallel tabulation process using machines.
The Nevada secretary of state’s office changed the hand counting regulations after Kampf and others criticized them during an Aug. 12 feedback session. The state officials changed the definition of “hand count” to apply only when it is the only method of counting ballots.
The regulations take effect Oct. 1 and will last until November 2023, though officials hope to adopt them permanently.
Four voting groups — Brennan Center, All Voting is Local, ACLU Nevada and Silver State Voices — had previously urged the secretary of state’s office to drop the regulations and instead ban hand counting altogether, saying that hand counting leads to more mistakes than machine voting and takes longer.
Voting rights attorney Sadmira Ramic of ACLU’s Nevada chapter called adopting the regulations “a slippery slope that will have dire consequences for the state,” creating more room for election errors and tampering.
“The secretary of state’s office, by passing these regulations, is condoning the use of hand counting while ignoring the urgency of the issues that such procedures will produce,” she said.
She also criticized a lack of enforcement or consequences for counties that don’t follow the rules.
Hand counting supporters have described the old-fashioned method as a way to address distrust in elections, especially unproven claims that voting machines are prone to hacking and are untrustworthy.
