Right-Wing Group Dismisses Voter Challenge Lawsuits in Nevada Counties

The right-wing organization Citizen Outreach Foundation voluntarily dismissed three lawsuits it filed in Nevada that asked county election officials to process around 30,000 voter challenges weeks before the election.
The organization, through its “Pigpen Project” initiative, filed thousands of voter challenges across the state in late July. Following the guidance of Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar (D), election officials in Carson City, Storey County, Clark County and Washoe County did not process those voter challenges.
In September, Citizen Outreach Foundation and its President Chuck Muth filed lawsuits against the local election officials claiming that they violated state law when they failed to process the voter challenges.
The plaintiffs asked state courts to order county officials to process the challenges immediately by mailing notices to the challenged registrants and marking them as inactive voters if they did not respond within 30 days. The plaintiffs also requested that ballots cast by the challenged registrants be separated until their voter eligibility could be confirmed.
County and state officials argued that Pigpen Project had failed to meet state requirements when submitting the challenges and that voter challenges cannot be processed within 90 days of an election per the National Voter Registration Act.
In a blog post announcing the dismissal, Muth said the lawsuits were “an expensive crap shoot with the odds already against us.”
Muth’s organization has already filed hundreds of new voter challenges and plans to lobby for legislative changes to Nevada’s voter roll maintenance process in the coming years.
Original post, Sept. 24
A right-wing group filed three lawsuits in four Nevada counties over the past several days, challenging local election officials’ failure to process voter roll challenges.
The lawsuits, which stem from a series of voter challenges submitted by the right-wing Pigpen Project, accuses election officials in Carson City, Storey County, Clark County and Washoe County of refusing to process the voter challenges. The Pigpen Project, a grassroots group started by longtime Nevada-based conservative activist and lobbyist Chuck Muth, filed voter challenges in nearly every Nevada county in June and July, claiming that his organization identified more than 30,000 registered voters who should be removed from voter rolls. This includes nearly 20,000 voters in Clark County and more than 11,000 voters in Washoe County
But the lawsuits, filed by the Citizens Outreach Foundation and Muth, claim that these voter challenges were refused by officials in Carson City, Storey, Clark and Washoe counties, in violation of state law.
These lawsuits come a little over a month after Nevada launched its new statewide unified voter registration system, which stores voter registration data for every registered voter in the state in a singular database, rather than multiple databases for each county.
“Instead of having, you know, 17 different systems doing list maintenance for our voter rolls, we have a single system now that allows us to directly manage that information and have a streamlined, unified process across the state for list maintenance,” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar (D) said in an interview when the new system launched. The new system is meant to keep better records of voter registration, in part to make it harder for third-party groups like the Pigpen Project to challenge county voter registrations rolls.
In the three lawsuits filed by Muth and Citizens Outreach Foundation, the petitioners are asking the court to force county officials to process the voter challenges.
Learn more about the Carson City and Storey County case here.
Learn more about the Clark County case here.
Learn more about the Washoe County case here.
This post was updated on Sept. 25 to reflect the number of voter challenges filed in Clark and Washoe counties.