The Honest Elections Project filed a brief in state court recently, defending Nevada’s duly-enacted election laws, including crucial voter protections that prevent ballot harvesting and ensure the integrity of absentee votes.
Jason Snead, executive director, made this statement:
“Almost every day, the Democratic Party or liberal groups target a new state with a lawsuit intended to strike down common sense election laws. Their objectives are laid out in plain text: to automatically mail ballots, even to voters the state believes have died or moved away; to legalize fraud-prone vote harvesting; and to deny officials key tools that let them weed out improper or fraudulent ballots.
Activists on the left frequently say they want secure and fair elections, but judging by their actions, they are working very hard to achieve the opposite.”
Our amicus brief makes several key points:
- Every state, including Nevada, has an important interest in preventing voter fraud and preserving public faith in the integrity of the electoral process. Organized ballot harvesting—a practice puts ballots in the hands of organizers, campaign staff, and candidates—undermines that interest, and Nevada is fully justified in banning it. Vote harvesting exposes voters to intimidation and coercion, and harvesters can tamper with or destroy ballots after they collect them, disenfranchising voters and potentially swinging elections. That happened in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race, which had to be redone because of a vote harvesting scheme.
- Voting in the midst of an evolving pandemic is already uncertain enough without the prospect of last-minute lawsuits seeking to change election rules. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that courts should not intervene and rewrite state election laws on the eve of a vote—the risk of courts causing voter confusion and wreaking havoc with the administration of elections by changing the rules at the eleventh hour is too great. The lessons of the Wisconsin election prove those concerns are valid: owing to the last-minute Democratic lawsuit, voting procedures were in flux until the night before the election, causing genuine uncertainty for voters and officials alike.
- When considering whether to enjoin Nevada law, the court should consider the recent litigation in Wisconsin. There, too, the Democratic Party sued Wisconsin to invalidate crucial ballot protections. After the District Court initially agreed to enjoin enforcement of absentee ballot witness requirements, the Seventh Circuit stayed that order, holding that the lower court had failed to fully consider the state’s interest in protecting the credibility of its elections against fraud.
Click here to read the full brief