Claims of Nevada voter fraud rejected by state’s top court

“Nevada: 42,000 voted twice 23,000 out of state residents 44,000 from commercial addresses.... 1,500 dead people! TOTAL margin of victory? 33,000,” a December 4, 2020 Facebook post reads.

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Screenshot of a Facebook post, taken on December 11, 2020

Some posts cited Pearson Sharp of One America News Network for the claims, and other users attached videos of the newscaster presenting them as fact.

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Screenshot of a Facebook post showing Pearson Sharp of One America News Network, taken on December 11, 2020

But on December 8, 2020, the Supreme Court of Nevada upheld the Carson City district court’s order dismissing the claims of election fraud.

The district court said of the Republicans’ evidence: “Most of these declarations were self-serving statements of little or no evidentiary value.”

According to a summary of the case, Republican electoral college voter candidates “filed a statement of contest challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in Nevada” on November 17, asking the district court to name President Donald Trump the winner, declare “null and void” Biden’s victory, or hold that no candidate be certified as the winner. 

The two courts dismissed the requests and determined that Biden won Nevada -- a battleground state in the 2020 presidential election -- by 33,596 votes.

The evidence submitted by the contestants was reviewed in full, and the district court found that it “lacked citation to facts,” had undergone “no quality control,” and witnesses had produced “little to no verification” of numbers and had “little to no information” about data origin.

“The Court finds that the expert testimony provided by Contestants was of little to no value… The Court is concerned about the failure of these experts to verify the data they were relying on.”

Double voting

Based on a witness’s testimony on the voter identification process -- two voters he checked in were not allowed to vote because records showed they already had -- the district court concluded that “the record does not support a finding that any Nevada voter voted twice.”

Dead voters

Contestants alleged that 500 votes from deceased voters were “improperly cast and counted,” but based on Nevada Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Wayne Thorley’s testimony on the process to “maintain voter rolls, including removing confirmed deceased voters,” the district court said the claim was unfounded.

Address issues

The district court also found no support for claims that election officials “counted ballots from voters who did not meet Nevada residency requirements” or “counted mail ballots from voters who also voted in other states.”

Nor did the United States Postal Service deliver mail-in ballots “to addresses where the addressee… was known to have moved from that address, or had no affiliation with that address at all,” or deliver ballots “to addresses where no known voter lives,” then have them “cast and counted,” the court said.

AFP Fact Check has debunked other false or misleading claims about the US 2020 election here.

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