The Washoe County Election system is under scrutiny as the new County Registrar of Voters is asking the county for support to streamline and bulk up the department.
“There's been a lot of things that we've heard regarding elections for the last couple years and there are some structural things within our department that are causing a lot of those complaints," said Washoe County Registrar of the Voters Jamie Rodriguez.
During the last several elections, there have been many concerns raised by voters of the Washoe County election process.
The election system was a top priority at the Washoe County Board of Commissioners annual strategic meeting on Wednesday.
Concerned voter Oscar Williams says that a drop in voter registration in the county is a sign that voters are losing confidence in the county election system.
"Erosion of voter confidence of trust in our elections and the people who run them."
William's concerns range from ballot tracking and inefficiencies costing the taxpayer. "A huge amount of paper ballot waste, like 70 to 80% of our paper ballots are going to the landfill. That's our tax dollars!," said Williams. "It comes down to spending and the systems that we use and the third parties. A number of statistical anomalies that have never been answered."
Washoe County Registrar for Voters Jamie Rodriguez says her department is being responsive to voters.
Rodriguez says a lot of the complaints they get stem from the multi-layered structure of their system. "So, our voter registration and our election management system from our poll book, it's separate from our election workers. And, so tying a lot that information - whether it's reporting to the state. Whether it's responding to public records requests becomes very difficult because we have to pull data from all these different sources," said Rodriguez.
To reduce the delays and confusion, Rodriguez's office is asking the county for new systems.
"New poll books, new election management, new voter registration systems - to better support all of those things to make the election more transparent and clearer. But, also allow us to provide more information at a more expedited rate than we're able to do right now."
Rodriguez says that with universal mail-in voting launched during the pandemic, there has come an influx of voter records.
It is an extremely manual process to update all voters... and they are asking the board for additional staff to speed up the process.
