The Citizen Outreach Foundation (COF), led by president Chuck Muth, is challenging a memo received by county election officials from the Nevada Secretary of State’s office advising them to reject certain voter roll challenges.

The foundation, through its Pigpen Project, has been working with election officials to identify ineligible voters on Nevada’s voter registration lists. Since May, the foundation has “filed roughly a dozen “test challenges” in Clark County under a provision of state law known as Section 547 using data from the secretary of state’s office and the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address database. It also compared this information with the “official voter registration records of 15 other states.”

The Federalist reports:

Section 547 mandates that electors who file an affidavit challenging a registrant’s eligibility must be “registered to vote in the same precinct as the person whose right to vote is [being] challenged” and that the challenge must be “based on the personal knowledge of the registered voter.” A separate provision of state law defines “personal knowledge” as used in Section 547 to mean “firsthand knowledge through experience or observation of the facts upon each ground that the challenge is based.”

The group’s May challenges were rejected on “the ground that the ‘personal knowledge’ requirement, as defined in the law, was not met; that personal knowledge of the official government data didn’t equate to ‘personal knowledge of the registered voter,’” according to Muth.

This prompted the COF to more closely analyze Section 535, which permits “any elector or other reliable person” to file challenges against registrants they have reason to believe are noncitizens or have moved to a different county or state with the “intention of remaining there for an indefinite time and with the intention of abandoning [their] residence in the county where registered” or registered in a different county or state. Unlike Section 547, however, this statute only requires challengers to affirm “that he or she has personal knowledge of the facts set forth in the affidavit.”

Using the Section 535 provision, the COF filed challenges on July 29 contesting the eligibility of nearly 4,000 Nevada registrants whom it contends no longer live in the state. (and registered in another state.)

Thirteen of the 17 Nevada counties received the challenges from COF and half of the counties processed them by sending a verification letter to the voter in question. The counties that were non responsive included Clark County, the largest county in the Silver State.

In early August, after the routine maintenance list was published by the NVSOS, the foundation filed another challenge related to voters who have moved out of the state, within the state to a different county, or moved within the county to a different voting district.

In a conversation with The Globe, Muth confirmed that an additional total of 34,222 challenges of “ineligible, ‘moved’ voters” had been filed in early August. Of that total, approximately 20,000 are in Clark County and an estimated 11,000 challenges were filed in Washoe County.

Due to the lack of response to those challenges, COF then filed a public records request in late August and found that the SOS had intervened by issuing a memo on August 27 to election officials.

The memo from Deputy Secretary of Elections Mark Wlaschin claimed that the “personal knowledge” requirement under Section 535 should be interpreted in exactly the same way as the requirement in Section 547. He further instructed clerks to reject challenges made under the former section by organizations like COF that do not fulfill the latter’s definition of “personal knowledge.”

“It is the opinion of the Secretary of State that such challenges do not meet the requirement of ‘personal knowledge’ of facts supporting the challenge required by NRS 293.535 and 293.547,” Wlaschin wrote. “County clerks who receive these challenges should reject them and instruct challengers that personal knowledge gained through firsthand experience or observation of the facts relating to a voter’s eligibility is necessary to file a valid challenge under either statute.”

Wlaschin admitted that “‘personal knowledge’ is not explicitly defined under [Section 535] or implementing regulations,” yet claimed “the Secretary views the term to mean the same thing in both statutes.”

In a letter (see below) sent to Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar on Sunday, COF challenged the rationale.

“[Y]our efforts over the past nine months to discourage and impede our ability to assist the clerks/registrars in assuring our elections are secure from individuals who have become ineligible to vote in Nevada elections does not engender confidence,” he wrote. “But there’s still time for you to do the right thing.”

“If there are raised any doubts about the integrity of any elections in Nevada in November that turn out to be close, it won’t be because of ‘right-wing election deniers’ but because of your actions to thwart the legitimate efforts of our organization to assist with the obviously flawed current system of identifying and removing ineligible voters from the Active voter rolls,” Muth wrote.

Speaking to The Federalist, the Aug. 27 memo effectively “closed off the final possibility of us being able to participate in cleaning up the voter rolls,” Muth said. “That’s why, at the end of my letter, I asked the secretary, ‘If we can’t do Sections 535 or 547, then what option is there?’”

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar has since referred Muth to communicate with/through the Attorney General’s office and had not replied to the Federalist’s request for comment.

Muth told The Globe his organization may file a lawsuit against the respective counties to ensure that Aguilar’s continued claim that “Nevada runs the most safe, secure and accessible elections in the country” can be proven by the maintenance of accurate voter rolls in accordance with federal and state law.

This is a developing story.