Registrar of voters works on post-election cleanup
By Kristen Hackbarth and Bob Conrad
Three candidates running for local offices have filed for a recount of ballots, and another, running for Nevada State Assembly, filed a lawsuit this week in the Nevada Supreme Court. The actions come as Washoe County is patching up its election processes amid allegations of mishandling the voting process.
Drew Ribar, who ran against Carson City incumbent legislator P.K. O’Neil, said he was unfairly treated because Washoe County failed to include his name on sample ballots sent to registered voters.
“I ran for office because I’m a frustrated business guy,” he told This Is Reno. “My goal was to hold government accountable.” He said he was informed by a constituent that his name was missing from sample ballots, which, he said, put him at a disadvantage.
“The government denied access to my name,” he added. “The government screwed up.”
Ribar said he complained to Washoe County officials.
“They apologized, they were very sorry, but they didn’t do anything,” he said. “The only way to hold them accountable at this time is to file a motion with the Supreme Court.” He added that he wants the county to re-run the election.
Three others have filed to recount ballots: Lily Baran, running for Reno City Council; Mark Lawson, challenging incumbent Washoe County Commissioner Clara Andriola; and far-right activist Paul White, who ran for school board and lost. KRNV’s Ben Margiott first reported on the recounts.
“What kind of candidates are we keeping out [of the process] if we are charging for that kind of money?”
Baran, a progressive activist, told This Is Reno that far-right election denier Robert Beadles paid more than $50,000 to the City of Reno for the recount, something she said some of her supporters are against. It is not clear whether another person can pay for a candidate’s request to recount ballots.
Unlike the other two challenging the ballots, Baran’s race against incumbent Kathleen Taylor’s seat on the city council saw her behind another Taylor challenger, Frank Perez, by only 15 votes. She said such a narrow margin should automatically trigger a recount like in other jurisdictions.
“I could never fathom [why it would cost] $50,000,” she said. Baran added that she does not agree with Beadles’s politics or anything about him, calling the decision to accept his payment for a recount difficult.
“My trusted mentors and people in my life that guide other decisions in my life agreed with the decision,” she said. “What kind of candidates are we keeping out [of the process] if we are charging for that kind of money?”
Baran said the process to initiate the recount was confusing, and both city and council employees seemed unsure of what to do, leaving her with limited time and options.
A new special meeting of Washoe County commissioners will be held on Tuesday, July 2, 2024, at 8 a.m. to review the recount results.
Registrar making changes
Staff in Washoe County’s Registrar of Voters office is already moving on to preparations for November’s general election. Registrar Cari-Ann Burgess updated the Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday on what her team is doing to ensure they’re ready for the fall general election.
“We have a lot going on in our office,” she said, noting a recent doubling of staff numbers to handle voter registration, voter list maintenance and verification work on submitted petitions.
Work is already underway to process 3,000 applications for changes to voter records. The registrar is required to send new voter registration cards reflecting those changes to voters by July 4.
Commissioner Mike Clark repeated his concerns about the 25,000 ballots returned to the registrar’s office as undeliverable—an issue he also brought up the week before when commissioners met to certify the election results. Clark accused previous registrars of not maintaining the county’s voter rolls for causing the waste. He asked how much the returned ballots had cost the county.
“That kind of mistake causes people who are already distrustful of the system to be distrustful,” he said.
Burgess gave Clark the same response she had before: federal law requires ballots to be sent to all active registered voters and limits how quickly voter rolls can be updated. She said the cost to print and mail those 25,000 ballots was $87,500 for printing and mailing—about $3.50 per ballot—and state statute requires ballots to be mailed.
Burgess, however, said her team would reduce the amount of work they’ve had managing the voter rolls when her office begins using VREMS, short for Voter Registration and Election Management Solution, which is the state’s new voter registration system. VREMS will go live in August, allowing staff to manage voter rolls in one system instead of two.
New equipment to improve efficiency
Burgess said she was most excited about new extraction machines arriving this week, which will help speed up the removal of ballots from mailing envelopes. She said nine two-person teams have previously been tasked with this activity, calling it time-consuming.
“That is our biggest bottleneck out of everything we do on how we process ballots,” she said.
The registrar’s office will also have a new ballot sorting machine operational by next week to replace an older one. The new machine will speed ballot sorting from 30,000 to 45,000 ballots per hour.
Two more scanning machines will also be added to the vote processing center. Burgess said that with many local, state and national offices up for grabs, five state ballot questions and a county ballot question, she expects a 3-4-card ballot in November. The extra scanners will help with the workload, she said. 
With all of the new machinery, Burgess said her team is moving machines within the vote processing center but working to ensure visibility for those who want to watch the vote counting.
“With the new machines and the way it’s going to work it will be a very nice configuration and things are going to be a little bit more [visible],” she said.
Two “large” petitions that would add state constitutional amendments to the November ballot questions also landed in the registrar’s office in June, adding to the pre-election workload. Burgess said a lot of work goes into every petition, including verifying signatures, ensuring they’re correctly dated and notarized, and ensuring the signatures are for the correct county and addresses.
Former Nye clerk touts paper ballots
Former Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf gave a presentation on paper ballots and hand-counting votes based on his experience during the 2022 election. Commissioner Clara Andriola requested the presentation, saying Kampf had an “opportunity to help Washoe County” by adding a hand-count audit to restore trust in elections.
“It’s important that we have a confidence level,” she said. “It’s not just Washoe County. It’s national. There’s a major mistrust of elections. Period.”
Kampf said paper ballots, rather than electronic voting machines, are much easier to implement than a hand count. He said he had 200 volunteers to count 17,000 ballots and didn’t have time to complete a hand count between election day, when counting was allowed to begin, and the deadline to certify the results.
“as a new clerk, I wasn’t going to totally rely on a hand count because it was my neck [on the line].”
Kampf said there’s a place for hand counts, but it’s still in the testing phase.
“I believe paper ballots can be done and they can be done easily and efficiently,” he said. “Maybe you don’t have as many vote centers as you have currently. Paper ballots is a definite win in my book. Not sure if 100% hand count, avoiding machines, is the way to go. You can get to the same results.”
Lobbyist Jennifer Willet, who represents the nonpartisan All Voting Is Local, said Nye County isn’t an example to follow.
“In 2022, Nye County’s hand-counting experiment was a disaster,” she said, noting that five talliers took three hours to count just 50 ballots. “One of the reasons it took so long was that the error rate of the hand count was estimated by Clerk Kampf to be 25%. When the parallel hand count was finally completed, they concluded the tabulation from the voting machines was accurate.”
She said this year’s primary was no better, with long lines reported by Nye County voters and poll monitors due to the use of all paper ballots. Changing Washoe County processes to those used by Nye County would be “catastrophic.”
She said hand-counting ballots could introduce corruption, chaos and delays that could stoke distrust in elections.
Kampf said hand counting was challenging because he was “hassled by the ACLU,” and the secretary of state “made it nearly impossible to do a hand count.”
Nye County’s hand count was in tandem with machine tabulation, a measure Kampf said he took because “as a new clerk, I wasn’t going to totally rely on a hand count because it was my neck [on the line].”
An audit of the difference in the machine versus hand count results had a .1% difference, Kampf said, or about 283 votes. In Washoe County’s June primary, one race had the second and third-place finishers within 15 votes – Baran’s – and another had just 146 votes between the first and second-place finishers.
Kampf, however, said machine tabulation isn’t what people should be concerned about.
“Our problem is not with the machinery we use,” he said. “I have not seen any evidence myself of that. What I’m more concerned about is our voter registration systems and processes. Guess what? Voter registration is out there, on the internet. If there is a problem, it’s in the voter registration process.”
