In a new report released Monday, Nevada’s Secretary of State’s office said there was “no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada” in the past few years. The office also said that many of the reports of election fraud it got did not involve any actual violations of election law.
The report, which was made as part of the state’s new quarterly election investigations, talks about the different investigations the Secretary of State’s office has done to make sure the state’s election system is honest and the process is more open.
The report talks about the results and current state of the different election investigations the office has done since 2020. It includes the number of cases that have been sent to the prosecution, the number of “double vote” cases that the office has caught, and the number of election fraud reports that the office has received and looked into.
The report says that since 2020, only 14 cases have been sent to the police to be possibly prosecuted. Of these, nine were from 2020 and five were from 2022.
The report talks about 146 “double vote” cases from 2022 that the Secretary of State’s Office looked into. These are cases where one person cast two votes. It is a crime in Nevada to try to vote twice.
Three of the cases the office looked into were sent to the state Attorney General’s Office to be prosecuted. Another 44 cases were sent to the state Department of Public Safety’s Investigation Division to be looked into further. Finally, 29 cases were looked into by the Secretary of State’s criminal investigations team but were closed by the office without any further action, according to the report.
After a civil notice, 15 cases were closed. Another 29 cases were closed with no action taken, and 26 cases are still open in case of cross-state votes.
The study says that the 146 cases of double votes are less than 0.0001% of the more than one million ballots that were cast in Nevada’s 2022 general election.
And starting with the 2024 presidential primary in February, six cases were looked into. Two are still being looked into by the Secretary of State’s Office, and four were closed with no violations.
Also, Nevada’s Secretary of State Office said they have received 100 Election Integrity Violation Reports since 2023. Of these, 33 cases are still open, 67 cases were closed with no violation, and none were found to have any violation.
The report was made public as part of the Nevada Secretary of State’s efforts to make the office’s work on election security more open. This is because the office is still getting a lot of complaints about alleged election fraud.
As the report came out, Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said, “There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada at any point in our state’s history.” “That has not stopped the Secretary of State’s Office from receiving a major increase in questions about election fraud and integrity.”
Stressing that none of the cases reported have shown any violation so far, Aguilar said that his office gets a lot of reports of election fraud. This is because people don’t understand the law and there are “attempts to overwhelm” his team during election cycles.
“There are a lot of reports that don’t involve any real violations of election law,” Aguilar said. “This happens for many reasons, such as people not knowing the law or trying to flood our office with false accusations during an election year. No matter what, we take every claim carefully and look into them as much as the law allows.
A new budget for the investigations team was passed by the legislature in 2023, so the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office had all the people it needed to fully staff the team earlier this year. The team is made up of two civil investigators and one criminal detective. The rest of the office also helps out.
