Voting under siege: Conspiracy theories and the refusal to certify results threaten Washoe County elections

In the wake of Donald Trump’s failed efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 presidential contest, Republican officials in at least 21 counties across eight states, including in Washoe County, refused—or threatened to refuse—to sign off on voting tallies in 2022 and this year, potentially delaying results and setting the stage for denying the outcome of the November election. 

In Washoe and across the country, Republican politicians cited relatively minor election glitches or baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud as reasons to decline to certify the votes of entire counties. Voting advocates and Democrats said that those officials are sowing seeds of doubt about the democratic process and laying the groundwork for claims of a “stolen” election should Trump lose again this year. 

Nevada officials warn that refusals to certify elections are attempts to amplify disinformation and increase doubt that people’s votes will be counted. In Washoe County, the three Republican commissioners who illegally voted against certifying a recount of two races in the June primary have set a dangerous precedent, they said. 

“It is unacceptable that any public officer would undermine the confidence of their voters,” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said in a joint statement in July. “The importance of this issue cannot be overstated.” 

“There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada, at any point in our state’s history” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, April 2024

Emily Rodriguez, communications and advocacy strategist with Protect Democracy, which describes itself as a “non-partisan and anti-authoritarian group,” said the trend started in 2022. “Delaying official election tallies may result in missed federal and state reporting deadlines, cause confusion and suspicion among voters and imperil the democratic process,” she said. “All uncertainty about who won elections is risky, especially in these intense times.” 

Election results in all 21 counties were eventually certified after dissenters were warned that the task is a “ministerial” duty, and county politicians don’t have the power to reject vote totals.  

With two seats on the Washoe County Commission in play this year, the previously mundane election-certification procedure has become an issue in those races and others across the country. 

The counting process 

In Nevada, after local precincts close, election workers tabulate the vote along with the mail-in ballots and send their unofficial counts to the Secretary of State’s office, which reviews the data for errors. At the county level, election officials check the precinct results and the counts in what’s called a “canvass” of the vote. The county assembles the results across all of its precincts and tabulates them. Each county commission, within 10 days after the election, then certifies the results and sends them to the state. By law, all allegations of improprieties or fraud are investigated by the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office. 

Why are county politicians required to certify the totals? The role of certification, Rodriguez explained, is not to verify the final vote count, but to sign off on the comprehensive verification process already performed. Those laws were codified in the states, she said, in direct response to past partisan attempts to sabotage certification in order to change election outcomes. 

Local election officials are like the umpires in a ball game, Rodriguez said, and the county commission is akin to the scoreskeeper. “After the game, the scorekeeper doesn’t have the authority to question a play and negate the score of the game,” she said. “Ultimately, we want to preserve the will of the people and not the wishes of the scorekeeper.” 

Officials who refuse to sign off on election results have justified their decisions by pointing to errors in voter rolls or by citing constituents who allege widespread voter fraud. In Washoe County, some residents who regularly show up at commission meetings parrot the claims of local GOP activist and conspiracy theorist Robert Beadles. Beadles insists, without evidence, that Nevada’s elections are always rigged in favor of Democrats. Carson City District Court Judge James Todd Russell dismissed Beadles’ lawsuit alleging fraud, noting his arguments were “a lot of smoke, mirrors and all kinds of fancy numbers” and “none of it makes any sense.” The Nevada Supreme Court upheld Russell’s ruling six months later. 

In April, the office of Nevada’s Secretary of State released a report that concluded there was “no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada” in 2020 or subsequent elections. Only 14 cases in the state were referred for possible prosecution since 2020, including nine cases from 2020 and five from 2022. A Brennan Center for Justice study of votes cast in 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 election found that after counting 23.5 million votes, “only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting” were referred for investigation or prosecution. 

“We’re seeing questions about voter rolls, non-citizens voting, dead people voting and so forth. Those things are meant not to discover evidence of fraud or improprieties, but to cast doubt on the process. So, if we get to the point where the votes have been counted and one side doesn’t like the results, they will say, ‘Look at all of that. We just can’t know what happened.’” Emily Rodriguez, Protect Democracy

An audit of Washoe County elections last year documented poorly maintained voter rolls and one very costly mistake: $200,000 was spent to reprint sample ballots that failed to include a libertarian candidate. None of the deficiencies found by the state or county officials affected the outcomes of the elections, according to the reports. 

The county investigation found that “unprecedented turnover” and inadequate staffing at the Registrar of Voters Office were at the root of the problems. The audit found no evidence of fraud. Nonetheless, some officials in Washoe County and elsewhere point to errors in voter rolls or ballot deliveries as justification for refusing to accept vote counts. Other officials and activists, absent evidence, make claims about “rigged” elections, mysterious computer algorithms that automatically change votes, debunked conspiracy theories about ineligible voters or vague suspicions that party functionaries steal mail-in ballots and fill them out en masse for the benefit of their candidates. 

The unfounded claims chip away at public confidence in the process, Rodriguez noted.  

“We’re seeing questions about voter rolls, non-citizens voting, dead people voting and so forth,” she noted. “Those things are meant not to discover evidence of fraud or improprieties, but to cast doubt on the process. So, if we get to the point where the votes have been counted, and one side doesn’t like the results, they will say, ‘Look at all of that. We just can’t know what happened.’” 

‘Rogue’ county commissioners 

In Washoe County, two of the three Republican commissioners, Jeanne Herman and Mike Clark, have consistently voted against certifying voting results. In 2020, Herman was the lone vote against certifying the general election, and Clark followed suit in subsequent elections. In July, Republican Clara Andriola—who had been the 3-2 swing vote to certify previous elections—joined her two GOP colleagues to vote against accepting the recount results for the June primary. The certification failed by a 3-2 vote, with the two Democrats voting to accept the totals. 

The results eventually were certified after state officials informed the dissenting commissioners they were breaking the law and petitioned the Nevada Supreme Court to intervene. Clark, who said he has concerns about election malfeasance, but was under “extreme duress” to change his vote, reversed course. The measure passed 4-1, with Herman the lone vote against certification. 

Herman also has supported drastic changes to elections, including using paper ballots instead of voting machines, hand-counting of ballots, eliminating voting by mail except for absentee ballots, and stationing sheriff’s deputies at polling places. 

Andriola, who is up for re-election this year, said in a prepared statement in July that she now understands certifying the vote totals “is a legal duty and affords no discretion to refuse. … We can and must do everything we can to restore faith and confidence in our elections.” She is facing two nonpartisan challengers in District 4, which leans Republican, in November. 

Secretary of State Aguilar, in a legal filing to the Nevada Supreme Court, warned that the threats of “rogue” commissioners like Herman rejecting ballot counts, even when they know it’s illegal, “provide a license and roadmap for likeminded commissioners to prevent certification of future elections,” in violation of the law. He asked the court to rule on the issue, but because the commission later certified the recounts, the justices declined to intervene. If commissioners reject certification in November, Aguilar warned, “the court would have mere hours or days—not weeks or months, as it does now—to consider this canvassing issue and avoid disrupting Nevadans’ voice in selecting their elected officials, including the next president of the United States.” 

Hill: Don’t meddle in elections  

Alexis Hill, a Democrat who now represents Washoe County’s Ward 1 and is chair of the commission, is facing a challenge from Marsha Berkbigler, a Republican who served on the panel for eight years until being defeated by Hill in 2020. If Andriola retains her seat as expected, and Berkbigler defeats Hill, the panel will consist of four Republicans and a lone Democrat, Commissioner Mariluz Garcia. 

“We certify so we can show the final vote totals in a public meeting. That’s important,” Hill said. “But I don’t think it’s appropriate at all for the commission to be meddling in those vote totals. It is important for us to provide the appropriate resources to the Registrar of Voters’ Office so that they can conduct a great election. (That’s what) we have done since 2022, when we certainly had a fair election, but mistakes were made, and it turned out we didn’t have sufficient staffing.” 

Hill reiterated that last year’s audit found nothing that would affect the outcomes of the races. 

“We need to invest in (the registrar’s) office, but not meddle in totals and take away people’s votes,” Hill said. Rejecting vote totals is “incredibly partisan. It’s right out of the Trump playbook. … (In Washoe), there is one person who told people beginning in 2021 not to believe in the vote (totals), and we’re all suffering because of it,” she said. 

The “one person” Hill referenced is Beadles, a wealthy Republican activist who moved to Washoe County in 2019 and subsequently put the County Commission and the School Board on notice that he would spend millions to replace their members with people who shared his viewpoints. Beadles declined to comment for this story. 

On his blog, Operation Sunlight, Beadles consistently claims he has “100% proof” our elections are predetermined in favor of Democrats. Beadles has branded the judges, officials and citizens who reject his allegations as either being corrupt or cowards. 

“In a county of over 500,000 people, I’m the only one calling out the county for breaking the law,” Beadles wrote on Dec. 18, 2023. “They counted all of our votes in secret. We can never verify what they say the results are. Meaning, we have to trust who they say wins; we can never verify it ourselves. We can never count the ballots. … Am I a conspiracy theorist like the media states, or did I just call out their BS to wake YOU up to what’s really happening?”  

In his posts, Beadles encourages his followers to attend commission meetings and testify about his fraud allegations and other complaints he spotlights on his blog. As a result, the commission’s public comment period sometimes goes on for hours.  

In this election cycle, state records show Beadles contributed $5,000 to Marsha Berkbigler, Hill’s Republican opponent in the District 1 race. In an interview with the RN&R, Berkbigler said she accepted Beadles’ donation, but does not agree with his theories about rigged elections. 

Berkbigler has concerns 

“I’m not close to Beadles,” she said. “He donated to my campaign because I’m honest. I believe in transparency, and you can trust me. He hasn’t asked me for a single thing. He hasn’t asked me to join him in his lawsuits or conspiracy theories or anything else.”  

Berkbigler routinely certified all elections during her previous two terms on the panel. She has never been an election denier, she said, and she doesn’t think her loss to Hill in 2020 was rigged, as Beadles maintains. But after the 2020 election, she said, there was a perception that the voting “wasn’t necessarily fair.” In 2020, Berkbigler said, she was told the livestream cameras in the registrar’s office “went down for a 15-minute period, and my numbers dropped significantly during that time”—an allegation she said she did not investigate. In 2022, Berkbigler said, an election worker was seen on video inserting a USB drive into one of the counting machines. “How do the citizens know if there wasn’t something on that thumb drive that altered the results?” she asked. 

Washoe County officials in September told the RN&R that cameras blinked out briefly a couple of times during the 2020 count, because YouTube didn’t support a 24-hour live feed. The cameras had to be switched to a different stream after 12 hours. Vote counting continued while the video feed went dark, they said.  

Workers in the registrar’s office aren’t allowed to connect USB drives to election computers, the officials said, except for a single thumb drive that collects data from all counting machines. In other words, the worker was caught doing his job, they said. 

In the June primary, Berkbigler said, “several” of her friends received more than one ballot in the mail. In the recount for two candidates in the primary, she said, mail-in ballots should have been counted by hand rather than by machine. 

When asked if she would have voted to certify the recounts for the June primary, Berkbigler said she wasn’t sure: “I’m on the fence about whether I would have stood with Jeanne Herman (against approval) or thought that because I’ve always approved (certification), I shouldn’t change that now,” she said. 

In light of the pushback from state officials, Berkbigler said she understands county commissioners don’t have the discretion to reject the vote count. “I believe state law is clear—I will certify elections, but that law needs to be changed before the county commissioners have a vote or a say,” she said. 

Hill said commissioners should not have the power to arbitrarily reject voting totals. She said she doesn’t believe Berkbigler’s concerns about voting procedures are legitimate. “My opponent will give any excuse to cast doubt on our elections and give her cute statement that she ‘may not have certified the election’ credence,” Hill said. 

Personal attacks 

Beadles’ blog entries often praise Berkbigler while vilifying Hill, who he calls the “illegitimately (s)elected commie Comrade Alexis Hill’Insky.” His posts about Hill are illustrated with a doctored image depicting the commissioner wearing a Chinese People’s Liberation Army uniform. Prior to the June primary, Beadles’ blog posts about incumbents he doesn’t like were repurposed into a direct mail campaign and paid for by Beadles’ PAC, the Franklin Project. Those mailers depicted Commissioner Andriola—who has unequivocally acknowledged the legitimacy of the 2020 elections—as a clown and a “Republican in name only”; pictured a school board incumbent as the grim reaper; and portrayed a Reno City Council candidate as a drag queen.  

Berkbigler said she doesn’t want that kind of help from Beadles or his PAC. 

“I said, ‘Look, you (Beadles) can do whatever you want, but please don’t put my name on any of the nasty stuff you do,’” she said. “I don’t want to be included in that. I run an above-board, honest campaign. … I’m not going to get down in the mud and wallow with the pigs. The name-calling that he’s done and the ‘Comrade Hill’insky’ stuff, I’m not going to get into that.” 

No matter who wins the two commission races in November, certification of elections will remain in the spotlight. Election deniers and others who are skeptical about the fairness of the process are expected to continue to make unsubstantiated claims of fraud, voting activists said.  

Rodriguez, of Protect Democracy, said any attempts in November to delay the vote count in any county will fail: “As we saw in Washoe, the secretary of state and the attorney general jumped in and filed an emergency petition with the Nevada Supreme Court to compel the commissioners to certify. There are consequences for not obeying the law,” she said. 

Baseless allegations of fraud, vague accusations and threats not to certify elections remain a danger to our democratic system, Rodriguez noted, and cause confusion and chaos. 

“It’s easy to take partial information and make wild claims about it,” she said. “That’s why it’s important for voters to understand the process, so if that happens, voters can investigate for themselves and know that the claims are not true. All of these things are knowable. It’s important to scrutinize these claims—and not just take someone’s word for it.”