The Nevada Vote: 2022 more secure than 2020, says top official
LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — I wanted to know, given all the controversy surrounding elections, is this election more secure than 2020?
“I would say 2022 is more secure than 2020,” says Mark Wlaschin, the Deputy Secretary of State for Elections, in charge of overseeing Nevada's election system.
The voting underway now will be Nevada's first statewide ballot since 2020, when Nevada became one of the epicenters of the Trump campaign's claims of voter fraud. No court found here, or elsewhere, that fraud swung the election to Joe Biden.
But that doesn't mean the Secretary of State's office hasn't looked at 2020 carefully, to find lessons for 2022.
“Many of the processes that we've reviewed and made better and improved upon are going to help reduce the possibility of fraud going forward,” Wlaschin told me.
Case in point: transparency. Wlaschin says counties have taken up the call to make the vote count as visible as possible.
“Clark County has gone through great lengths, Washoe County has gone through great lengths, to improve that transparency,” he says.
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We saw it first hand: at Clark County Election headquarters, the vote-counting process has been consolidated into one building. The areas for election observers have been expanded.
All this is happening as Nevada votes in the June primary. The Secretary of State says, after the first week, almost 40 percent of ballots have been cast in person. 43-percent have been done by mail.
Wlaschin tells me his office received 4,759 requests to opt-out of the mail ballot process by the deadline earlier this year.
The primary will be a dry run for November when the stakes are higher. Wlaschin says they expect vote count challenges.
“Really, something that happens for every election,” Wlaschin says, adding “I was appointed as the deputy for elections in October 2020 so to an extent, this is all I know: the idea of a contested election.”
And one where skeptics still question if the vote will be done fairly. I met Republican Susan Profitt Monday who was observing the count earlier this week at our election headquarters.
Will there be controversy this election? I asked her.
“There should be, because I was here and I witnessed the steal,” she told me.
Proffitt was talking about 2020. Two years later, Nevada braces for another election, and here's the promise:
“The bottom line is when it comes to election integrity, from the Secretary of State again on down, none of us want to allow somebody to vote illegally,” Wlaschin says.
