Lawmakers were told Friday that Nevada may miss the federal deadline to install a “top down” comprehensive voter registration system.
Mark Wlaschin, elections deputy for the Secretary of State, told the Legislative Operations and Elections interim committee his office is working hard to hit the January 2024 deadline but doubts they’ll have it up and running a year from now.
“In the next 12 months, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to push forward and implement the top down system,” he said.
That new system is required to put an accurate and unified list of registered voters at the state level. At present, each county operates and maintains its own system and, in Nevada’s 17 counties, every one of those systems is different and not connected to each other to prevent multiple voter registrations in different counties.
The current system also prevents checking whether a voter may be registered in more than one state to prevent people from voting more than once in an election.
Beyond that, he said it’s also hard to track voters who die before an election but remain on the list of those registered. He said he and officials at the state’s Vital Statistics division are working on real time tracking of those deaths.
Wlaschin said the process is further complicated by the fact that election laws are very different in different states.
He told the committee there is about $6 million in federal Help America Vote Act funding left to help implement the project but that more will be needed.
“The cost is certainly going to exceed the funds available,” he said.
He said he will approach the 2023 Legislature to get the necessary funding to complete the job but that, at present, they are busy working on the RFP to spell out what Nevada needs and figure out what it will cost.
Assemblywoman Maggie Carlton, D-Las Vegas, questioned whether elections officials had looked at other states that may be much farther along saying there is “no need to reinvent the wheel.” Wlaschin said they are in contact with a half dozen states that are farther along in the process and that they are hoping for an off-the-shelf solution that would be far cheaper than a new, customized computerized system.
