A lot of conservatives talk about election integrity. Chuck Muth, president of Nevada’s Citizen Outreach Foundation, is walking the walk.
Last year, Muth and crew launched the Pigpen Project, an initiative taking on Nevada’s dirty voter rolls, using an advanced software system to help local elections officials do their jobs. While there may be a limit to what election integrity watchdogs can do in a universal mail-in ballot state with a Democrat-controlled legislature, Muth said fighting for list maintenance is absolutely essential for fair elections.
“But the one thing we can do under existing laws – and this is non-partisan – is work to clean up our ‘dirty’ voter lists BEFORE the next election. Nothing is more important or doable,” the longtime conservative activist wrote in a February 2023 post announcing the rollout of the project.
The Pigpen Project has had some success, working with elections officials in Clark County — home to Las Vegas and the most populated region of the Silver State — in an attempt to inactivate hundreds of outdated registrations on the voter list. Election integrity success, of course, is a threat to the left, which has little interest in “protecting every eligible vote and every eligible voter.” So, Democrat public relations outlets, particularly The New York Times, have attacked the effort.
‘Bad Addresses’
The group draws no small amount of inspiration from J. Christian Adams’ Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has taken on dirty voter rolls across the country, including swing state Nevada. As The Federalist has reported, PILF has uncovered — and confirmed — hundreds of “bad addresses,” or individuals who don’t live at the commercial addresses they have listed as their residences. Phony addresses include everything from strip clubs to strip malls. Those individuals, according to the foundation’s investigations, remain on Nevada’s voter rolls.
PILF investigators know the addresses are bad because they personally checked each one.
That’s similar to what Pigpen Project volunteers did in determining hundreds of individuals listed as active on Nevada’s voter rolls not only live in another state, but are registered and have voted there as well.
As of late last month, Muth told me, the Pigpen Project had submitted to local elections officials across the state more than 1,000 active names on Nevada’s voter rolls of individuals who have moved, registered, and voted in another state. Those voters have been identified as having submitted a change of address to the U.S. Postal Service “declaring they’ve moved permanently to another state,” Muth said.
Muth’s group has submitted the names of another 768 individuals who allegedly had moved out of state and registered there but don’t appear to have voted, according to its website. Their numbers show the vast majority of those “active” Nevada voters came from Clark and Washoe counties, Democrat strongholds and the dominant population centers of the state.
“[T]hese voters should be removed from the Nevada voter rolls or, at least, be moved from ‘active’ to ‘inactive’ status – which would mean they wouldn’t be automatically mailed a ballot for the November election,” Muth wrote in a June 28 update.
All told, Muth said the Clark County Election Department had sent postcards out to 600 individuals confirmed by the Pigpen Project to no longer reside in Nevada. Another 117 remained to be processed by the agency. Just how many of the 717 allegedly ineligible voters have been inactivated isn’t clear, and the elections office did not return a request for comment. Muth said his organization will get the updated voter list toward the end of the month, and will be able to check the status at that time.
Upon receiving “reliable and reasonable” information regarding an ineligible voter, the local election office is supposed to send out a notification to the address. If a postcard comes back as undeliverable or the individual doesn’t respond, the voter faces being moved from “active” to “inactive” on the list.
Left-Wing Attack Machine
Muth said a New York Times hit piece, headlined “Trump’s Allies Ramp Up Campaign Targeting Voter Rolls,” got a lot of details about the Pigpen Project wrong. The story, Muth said, erroneously reported that the project’s Eagle AI tracking software “uses a platform based on data from VoteRef.com,” which publishes voter information online. The left hates the Voter Reference Foundation, insisting the organization “has repeatedly pushed conspiracies about election fraud.” Interestingly, Russia-collusion hoax peddler Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket doesn’t care for citizens investigating voter eligibility — or ineligibility, as the case may be.
“VoteRef has also encouraged election vigilantism, and the platform can help to increase voter challenges, a legal, though deeply flawed, practice in many states that allows private citizens to challenge the voter eligibility of other voters,” the leftist website, part of a lawfare network created to help Democrats win at the polls, asserts.
Muth said the Pigpen Project only uses NCOA (National Change of Address) data from the Postal Service provided by a licensed vendor. And the project draws from official voter registration data from 16 states and counting, he added.
Fixing a Serious Problem
The Times also reported that Muth and fellow conservative activist Dan Burdish, in organizing their door-to-door canvassing efforts “enlisted landlords to compare voter rolls with their leading records.” Muth said the Pigpen Project didn’t “enlist” landlords. In a recent column debunking the Times hit piece, the election integrity activist wrote that some landlords learned of the project and approached the organizers.
“They asked if we could help with the problem of ballots piling up in their mail rooms for people who no longer lived there,” Muth wrote. “This is a legitimate concern and problem we’re trying to fix.” He noted that he and one apartment owner met with Clark County elections officials to come up with a solution “within the requirements and constraints of election law.”
“Nevertheless, how is that something nefarious?” Muth asked. “If the registered voter no longer lives where they’re registered to vote, how does it make sense to keep mailing them a ballot where they won’t receive it…or worse, could be picked up by someone other than the voter?”
The problem is exacerbated in states like swing state Nevada, where all registered voters automatically receive a vote-by-mail ballot — including those who should no longer be on the voter rolls.
Stephanie Wheatley, a spokeswoman for Clark County, told the Times that Pigpen Project officials provided enough evidence “for the election department to do research and investigate.”
Despite what appears to be convincing data, Muth said some election officials have dug in their heels to defend the status quo. A Washoe County official told Elias’ Democracy Docket that “third-party efforts to remove voters do not follow” legal procedures “to challenge the residency and eligibility of a voter.”
“It is a voter’s responsibility to update their registration by notifying our office, and without their consent there are extensive steps defined by statute that must be taken before we can make any changes that would affect their ability to vote,” Washoe County spokeswoman Bethany Drysdale wrote in an email statement, according to Democracy Docket.
But Washoe County, home to Reno, Nevada’s second largest city, has had some trouble moving on cleaning up its dirty voter rolls. The Public Interest Legal Foundation earlier this year filed a petition for mandamus to force Washoe County to investigate and remove illegal commercial addresses on its voter list.
Making the Case
Muth and his fellow election integrity advocates were hopeful local elections officials would finish their investigations by early this month. Stipulations in Nevada election law make it more complicated to challenge eligibility in the coming months leading up to November’s election.
The effort to take on Nevada’s dirty voter rolls started relatively small by design. Muth will tell you there are tens of thousands more suspect names on the registration list, but the Citizen Outreach Foundation is but one election integrity group with only so many resources. What the Pigpen Project ultimately aims to do is demonstrate through meticulous data research and boots-on-the-ground confirmation that there is indeed a problem with voter roll maintenance in the Silver State and it needs much more attention.
“In order [to] work with an outside entity like us, the secretary of state has advised that all county clerks and registrars accept only information that is reasonable and reliable,” Muth said. “The information that we’re giving to the grassroots volunteers who are going door to door really helps buttress our case. So if the Left claims we’re partisan or whacky conspiracy theorists, we’ve gone door to door to make sure our information is reliable.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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