In an attempt to cast doubt on ballot totals coming out of Nevada, the Trump campaign publicly touted an alleged example of fraud, but Nevada officials said that was simply false.
Trump campaign officials on Thursday held a press conference announcing they were filing a lawsuit in Clark County claiming that Nevada’s mail-in ballot voting process resulted in fraudulent votes being cast across the state by ineligible voters while election officials were also denying citizens their constitutional right to vote.
“We firmly believe that there are many voters in this group of mail-in people that are not proper voters. In the last many days, we have received reports of many irregularities across the valley,” said former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt (R). “We believe there are dead voters that have been counted. We are also certain there are thousands of people whose votes have been counted who have moved out of Clark County during the pandemic.”
Laxalt then held up the case of a 79-year-old legally blind Nevada woman as evidence that the state’s voting irregularities were real.
“Today, we have a voter, Jill Stokke, who was denied access to vote. She showed up to vote and she was told someone had already cast her ballot and she was denied the opportunity to vote,” Laxalt continued. “We are filing in federal district court here in Las Vegas. We’re asking for emergency relief, a TRO, injunctive relief—we’re asking the judge to, due to all of these irregularities, to stop the counting of improper votes.”
After brief statements from former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and GOP operative Matt Schlapp, Stokke approached the lectern and recounted her story.
“I went to vote and was told I already voted,” she said, adding that in the past she had always only ever voted in-person. “This time they mailed out the ballot and somebody took my ballot. They also took the ballot of my roommate.”
In an earlier interview with NewsNow Las Vegas, Stokke said election officials refused to let her vote in-person, telling her that her mail-in ballot had been processed and the signature had been matched and verified.
“I said, it couldn’t match, because I didn’t vote,” she said, adding that she’d also reached out to an attorney over the matter.
But Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said Stokke’s version of events doesn’t match-up with reality.
Gloria said he handled Stokke’s complaint himself and despite officials believing that the signature on her ballot matched the one they had on file, the county gave her the option to challenge her verified mail-in ballot.
“I personally dealt with (her issue). She brought her claim to me. We reviewed her ballot, and in our opinion, it is her signature,” Gloria said at a news conference on Thursday. “We also gave her an opportunity to provide a statement, if she wanted to object to that and provide a challenge to that. She refused to do so. A member of the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office investigations team also interviewed her, and they had no issue with the assistance we tried to give her.”
In other words, Stokke was given an opportunity to fix whatever the problem was and declined to do so; the Office of Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, interviewed Stokke and found no issue with the county’s handling of Stokke’s complaint.
During the press conference, Gloria said that the county was “not aware of any improper ballots being processed.” Watch the moment Gloria responded to the Stokke claims below:
[image via YouTube screengrab]