With Washoe County interim Registrar of Voters Cari-Ann Burgess taking a leave of absence, I suppose the county’s elections will be supervised by an interim interim registrar.
On the one hand, there’s something darkly funny about the swingiest county in the swingiest state going through election administrators the way Spinal Tap went through drummers or the way Monty Python went through opening credits at the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
On the other hand, voters in Washoe County, to say nothing of the millions of Nevadans and hundreds of millions of Americans who are counting on the county to conduct a competent election, deserve better than to — with apologies to Monty Python — have the county’s elections completed in an entirely different style at great expense at the last minute.
That, however, is precisely what the county commission — the elected body that appointed Burgess as interim registrar in the first place — demanded she do two months ago.
In a truly stupefying act of misplaced political courage, Clara Andriola and her fellow Republicans on the county commission voted against certifying her own election. The reason? Burgess rightly followed state laws and regulations and recounted the county’s ballots in the same manner as they were originally counted — with a voting machine. The Republican county commissioners, meanwhile, wanted her and her team to recount the thousands of ballots by hand — never mind that Washoe County stopped hand counting ballots nearly 70 years ago.
That stunt made national news. It also served as a vote of no confidence against the interim registrar that Andriola herself voted to appoint in January, one which she likely took personally.
I certainly would, were I in her position.
Now it is nearly October. The first ballots of the general election have already been cast. Early voting for most of us will begin in roughly three weeks. Yet Nevada’s second-most populous county, the one whose voters will likely provide the deciding margin for Nevada’s presidential electors, will apparently administer its election without anyone formally in charge.
To be clear, I have no doubt that Washoe County will successfully conduct a safe and secure election. Like every other county in Nevada, it has a brand-new election management system managed by the state. This system replaces the self-supported system the county used in this year’s primary election, which was clearly starting to show its age.
Washoe County is going to need all of the help it can get. Thankfully, the secretary of state’s office has placed itself in a position to directly provide some.
I do, however, doubt that the county will successfully conduct a flawless election.
Though the county’s election office has been reliably completing the most important task in an election — namely, accurately counting ballots and reporting the results within statutory deadlines — it’s clearly been struggling nearly everywhere else. Sample ballots were misprinted prior to the last general election — and were misprinted again prior to the most recent primary election 18 months later. Mail ballots were also sent to voters who had opted out of mail voting. Voter registration statistics reports on the county’s website are months behind the reports available from the secretary of state’s office.
These are preventable errors and lapses that didn’t used to happen. Not this frequently. Not this regularly.
They are, to put it mildly, not reassuring.
That said, they are also the inevitable product of a relentless campaign waged during the past few years to harass and second-guess election workers in the county.
Some of the harassment has been coming from the public — or, more accurately, a small but persistently noisome group of gadflies who tried to argue in court that they have a constitutional right to harass election workers. When that argument failed, the most noisome of the bunch flushed six figures’ worth of his own money down his toilet in Lodi, California, in a futile bid to replace several members of the county government.
To the county’s credit, it capably defended itself and its staff in court. Curiously, however, there haven’t been any notable prosecutions under the state’s new election worker protection law. Did everyone stop harassing election workers, including Burgess, after the law was signed by the governor last year?
Far too much of the harassment, however, has been coming from the county commission itself.
Nobody wants to work for an employer that wants to throw their computers in the trash and send the National Guard to their workplace. Nobody wants to work for an employer that entertains hours of public comment demeaning their work every month. Certainly nobody wants to work for an employer that will only support their work under threat of lawsuit, especially when they’re still wearing the “interim” label and have been on the job for only a few months.
Nobody, in short, wants to administer elections for a county commission that, in a moment of comical and almost certainly unintentional self-awareness, was accurately described as a “laughingstock” by Republican Washoe County Commissioner Mike Clark.
Unfortunately, since Clark’s term doesn’t end until 2026, voters likely have at least two more years of this mismanagement — or, at this rate, three more registrars and several more national news stories — to endure.
Perhaps I’ll rewatch Reno 911 while we wait.
David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].
