A report spread on social media claiming that Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford admitted to manually changing signature verifications by more than 200,000 votes. His office told Reuters it was false. Following the U.S. presidential election in 2020, the Trump campaign and its allies addressed several lawsuits in Nevada related to the automatic matching of signatures, none of which were successful.
Nevada AG admits that it manually changed signature verifications for more than 200,000 votes. Everyone knows this, right? ‘says the report (here). The same post will also be distributed in November 2020, following the US presidential election (here, here, here), and was evacuated at the time by the fact controller PolitiFact and USA Today (here, here).
Monica Moazez, communications director of the Nevada Attorney General’s office, told Reuters in an email that there was “no truth” in the allegation posted by social media. “AG Ford wants to reiterate that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada and that our election was fair and safe. This has been proven time and time again in numerous courts, “Moazez added.
The posts can be traced back to claims made on Fox News in November 2020 by Adam Laxalt, who was the Nevada Attorney General, from January 5, 2015 to January 7, 2019 (ag.nv.gov/bios/bio/). In an interview, Laxalt claims that 200,000 votes were verified by email only per machine. He claims that the signature verification standard on the machine that read the ballot papers has been reduced to 40%, and that the photos of the signatures are not of sufficient quality to make signature verification work, which means that bad signatures can slip through the system and thus enabling the voter to commit fraud (here). The headline of an article on these comments is consistent with the text of social media posts, saying: “Nevada AG admits that they manually changed signature verification for more than 200,000 votes.” (here)
The Nevada State Department’s website says the signature is verified on every vote received here. It adds that ‘if the signature is missing or if the signature on the envelope of the ballot paper does not match the signature on the file, the ballot paper will not be counted until the voter has confirmed the signature.’
Clark County was the only state in Nevada to use Agilis sorting machines (here), equipped with automated Parascript signing software (www.parascript.com/) that matches signatures on ballot papers with voter records (here, here ).
The Trump campaign and Trump’s allies have filed several lawsuits against the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Nevada, most of which sought to undermine or stop the automatic signature agreement in Clark County. All these lawsuits have been rejected, denied or withdrawn (here, here).
In the lawsuit Law v Whitmer, the district court published a ‘findings of fact’ after reviewing evidence from competitors and defendants. It has been noted that although there is no recommended setting, the Agilis machine has a preset of 50. Clark County has chosen the institution of 40, which means signatures must achieve at least 40 to be accepted without further review (here). The court’s findings refer to the defeat of Jeff Ellington, the president of the company that manufactures the Agilis machine, because the automatic signature verification is a logarithmic algorithm … any setting between 15 and 85 will produce essentially the same results ”( here).
Signatures that scored less than 40 were marked for human verification. In the case of the November election, about 30% of the signatures were verified by the Agilis machine and about 70% were marked by people from Clark County (here, here) for human verification. In the Fox News interview, Laxalt begins by saying, “We have more than 600,000 emails counted.” 30% of 600,000 is 180,000, so if Laxalt says that 200,000 ballots per machine are checked by one machine only, it roughly matches the percentage of signatures confirmed by the Agilis machine, just as set out in the lawsuit .
On Laxalt’s allegations about the image quality of the signature, the court’s findings state that ‘many signatures of comparators in Clark County’s database are low quality images. […] with a DPI (points per inch) below 200. ”It is also said that when an image is below 200 DPI, the Agilis machine can not match the signature and will therefore pass it on for human verification: ‘comparative signatures of low quality will cause the Agilis machine not to verify signatures; it will not cause the Agilis machine to incorrectly accept signatures that are not genuine. ”(Here)
In the same lawsuit, the district court found ‘participants under no standard of evidence proved that the Agilis machine was functioning in a manner sufficient to create reasonable doubt about the outcome of the election’ (here) and that ‘Clark County’s use of Agilis machines were legal under Nevada law ”(here). The first district court in the state of Nevada also found in the Kraus v Cegavske lawsuit that there was no evidence of errors when the automatic Agilis system was used: ‘No evidence has been presented that there is any indication of any error in Agilis of Clark County no. signature match rate. ”(Here).
On December 2, 2020, Ford issued a statement regarding Laxalt and his allegations: ‘Because I take fraud allegations seriously, I personally requested that President Trump’s team, including former Attorney General Adam Laxalt, file an official complaint and submit supporting evidence at my office. . They have filed another complaint containing the allegations they are making in public and providing evidence. In the absence of such a complaint and supporting evidence, these allegations of widespread voter fraud remain unfounded and, moreover, insulting to the countless election workers who closely monitored our election. ”(Here)
As reported here by Reuters, state and federal judges – some appointed by former President Trump – have rejected more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump or his allies over the election fraud and other irregularities in the 2020 presidential election. Independent experts, governors and state election officials from both parties say there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
Reuters had earlier downplayed false claims related to the 2020 presidential election in Nevada (here, here, here).
VERDICT
Untrue. The Nevada attorney general told Reuters he did not admit to manually changing signature verifications on ballot papers. The claims can be traced back to rebuttal allegations made by the former attorney general.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.