Right-Wing Group Drops Lawsuit Challenging Nevada County’s Voter Rolls
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a right-wing legal group, dismissed its Nevada lawsuit Wednesday against Clark County Registrar of Voters (ROV) Lorena Portillo, claiming she did not properly maintain county voter rolls.
The decision to dismiss the case comes after the registrar’s office provided proof that it had already investigated the voter registrations PILF challenged in its lawsuit.
On June 25, PILF sued Portillo, alleging there were almost 90 commercial addresses listed in the county’s voter rolls in violation of state law that requires voters to provide a residential address when they register to vote. In the lawsuit, PILF claimed they informed Portillo’s office of the issue and asked them to investigate but never received a response.
On August 15, Portillo filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, explaining that PILF’s request came just days before the state’s primary election — and days after early voting started — demanding a response before her office’s deadline to submit the election results to the Clark County Board of County Commissioners for certification.
“Rather than allowing the ROV sufficient time to respond to the Petitioners’ lengthy demand, the Petitioners improperly filed this Petition on June 25, 2024, demanding that the ROV investigate certain addresses on the voter registration roll,” a Clark County district attorney argued in the motion. Under state law, a request to ROV to investigate voter registrations is discretionary, not required by law.
But, Portillo’s office did investigate PILF’s claims after they finished their work related to the primary elections. Of the nearly 90 addresses that PILF flagged, the ROV found that a majority of them were valid voter registration addresses, were largely identified previously by the state’s elections department or connected to voided registrations.
“In light of the investigation, the Petitioners have received all the relief sought by this Action,” PILF’s lawyers wrote in its stipulation of dismissal.
Last week, Nevada launched a new statewide unified voter registration system, which puts voter roll data for every county into one top-down database. The system will make it easier for each county to share data on voter registration and maintain accurate rolls — and make it harder for legal challenges to individual county’s voter rolls.