Led by President Donald Trump, Republicans for years have relentlessly alleged mass voter fraud without producing any evidence of its existence. (Screenshot from Trump campaign's video of Minden, Nevada rally in September 2020)
There have only been 11 instances of election fraud in Nevada – out of nearly 9 million votes cast – over the last decade, according to a new report from UNLV. Most have those resulted in criminal convictions.
Led by President Donald Trump, Republicans for years have relentlessly alleged mass voter fraud without producing any evidence of its existence.
Jim Marchant, the Republican candidate for Nevada Secretary of State, has repeatedly claimed that the state has “had fraudulent elections since 2008.”
Using data compiled from the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, Brookings Mountain West and Lincy Institute at UNLV published a report last week analyzing election fraud that showed 85 cases since 1998 in Mountain West States, which includes Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.
Election fraud includes buying votes, duplicating votes, false registration, fraudulent use of absentee ballots, illegal ‘assistance’ at the polls, impersonation fraud at the polls, and ineligible voting.
A separate Brookings Institute analysis of the Heritage data two years ago noted that in order to create an election fraud database the “Heritage staff had to go back decades in time where there have been hundreds of millions of votes cast and a very small number of cases of election fraud have been found, none of which affected election outcomes.”
The analysis of the Heritage data also noted that during the 10-year period where 11 instances were found in Nevada that there were 14 elections and 8.5 million votes cast.
Of the 11 cases identified between 2012 and 2021 in Nevada, 10 resulted in criminal convictions.
The analysis found that in over nearly three decades in the Mountain West Region there have been 30 cases across the region of duplicative voting, which is the highest type of election fraud cases among the five states.
Four cases in Nevada involved duplicate voting and five involved false registration – one case used both.
Among the duplicate voting cases included Donald Kirk Hartle, a Clark County man Republicans showcased in attempts to spread misinformation and unfounded claims about massive voter fraud.
The Nevada Republican Party had promoted Kirk’s story that his wife Rosemarie, who died in 2017, had cast a ballot in the 2020 election. But it was Hartle who voted under his late wife’s name.
Hartle pleaded guilty in 2021.
Two Nevada cases over nearly three decades involved a “non-citizen.”
One was a Las Vegas resident named Biqui Diana Parra Rodriguez who “illegally obtained personal information” of a person and “registered to vote under her name in 2011 and in 2012,” according to a 2014 press release from the Nevada Secretary of State.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time that she had registered as a Republican and a Democrat.
The other case involved Hortencia Segura-Munoz, who registered Republican, cast ballots in the 2008 and 2010 elections, and was convicted in 2014.
The report found two cases of ballot petition fraud in Nevada with one criminally convicted and another sent to a diversion program.
There was one case in all five states that had a conviction for buying votes, and it was in Nevada.
Stephen Gregory Zority was charged in 2017 for illegally paying a woman “with gift cards and cash for registering Republican voters in Clark County.” He was convicted in 2021.
