LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – The Nevada Secretary of State has described a recent lawsuit filed by the state GOP over voter registration as “meritless.”
On March 18, the Nevada Republican Party and the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit against Sec. of State Francisco Aguilar over claims of “impossibly high” voter registration numbers in several counties.
The lawsuit claims that three Nevada counties have “more registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18.” According to the GOP, the counties include Douglas County, which reported a 104% registration rate; Lyon County, which reported 105%; and Storey County, which reported 113%.
Two more counties have also reported “voter registration rates that exceed 90 percent of adult citizens…” These include Carson City, which reported a 92% registration rate, and Clark County, which reported 91%.
According to the lawsuit, these rates are “abnormally or… impossibly high,” especially when considering that registration rates in Nevada for the 2022 and 2020 elections were “65.1% and 66.2% respectively.”
“The RNC and its members are concerned that Defendants’ failure to comply with… voter-list maintenance obligations undermines the integrity of elections by increasing the opportunity for ineligible voters or voters intent on fraud to cast ballots,” the lawsuit reads.
In a statement on Friday, Sec. Aguilar issued a statement, claiming the lawsuit was “meritless” and that his office would be filing a motion to dismiss in response.
In a letter responding to the lawsuit, Senior Deputy Attorney General Laena St-Jules responded to the party’s claims by highlighting that the lawsuit compares to different, unrelated data sets to reach the “impossibly high” rates.
“You rely on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (“CPS”) to say that Nevada had a registration rate of 65.1% in 2022. And you rely on data from an entirely different survey, the 2017- 2021 5-Year Citizen Voting Age Population (“CVAP”), to provide the denominator for your calculation of the current registration rates in the Counties,” the letter states. “This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
It also notes that census data is usually collected from one member of a household, and was only collected from 1,000 Nevada households in total.
Additionally, the letter claims the GOP’s analysis errors are compounded by comparing the census data to the CVAP, which is based on a five-year survey conducted from 2017 to 2021. Since the study only estimates Nevada’s population at the mid-point of 2019, St-Jules notes that this completely disregards the rapid growth the state has seen in recent years.
As of Friday, a hearing date for the lawsuit has not been scheduled.
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