On Friday, Citizen Outreach Foundation (COF), sponsor of the Pigpen Project to clean up the voter rolls in Nevada, filed a lawsuit (see below) against the clerk’s offices in two Nevada counties asking the court to instruct them to process challenges of suspected ineligible voters who have moved from the residence where they are registered.

For background, as reported by The Globe:

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.”

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.”

Filed by The O’Mara Law Firm on behalf of COF, the Petition for Writ of Mandamus asks the First Judicial Court of the State of Nevada “to compel the Carson City and Storey County Clerks to perform their duties…by requiring the Clerks to notify the registrant of the challenge and take the necessary actions as required under NRS 293.530.”

“This was a last resort action we’ve worked hard to avoid,” said Chuck Muth, president of COF, in a press release. “We’ve done everything by the book and according to the law, but the Clerks got caught between a rock and a hard place. Some had been properly processing our challenges as required by law,” Muth continued, “until Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar issued a directive in August advising them to reject our challenges based on a bizarre reading of the statute. So we were left with no choice but to seek the court’s intervention,” he concluded.

Muth noted that some Clerks had been working cooperatively with his organization in processing the challenges until Secretary Aguilar’s memo, while others have been hiding behind the directive as an excuse to duck their responsibilities.

This is the first of what COF expects will be multiple lawsuits filed in other counties this week unless they reject the Secretary of State’s opinion and immediately begin processing the duly-filed challenges.