Nevada Republican gubernatorial candidate Joey Gilbert speaks to guests during a bus tour throughout Las Vegas Monday, May 16, 2022. WADE VANDERVORT
Friday, July 1, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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A video that Reno attorney Joey Gilbert says proves fraud in last month’s primary election actually shows a Washoe County election official doing his job, a county official says.
Gilbert is refusing to concede his loss in a 12-way primary election for the Republican nomination for governor, despite coming up about 26,000 votes short of the declared winner, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo.
On Tuesday, Gilbert shared a two-minute, 27-second video on his Facebook page of a portion of a livestream of the Washoe County ballot room. The video shows a man walking down an aisle and stopping at different machines. Gilbert’s accompanying comments included “talk about guilty as sin” and “CORRUPT as hell.” He suggested the man was entering and uploading something into the computers.
Bethany Drysdale, media and communications manager for Washoe County, said the man in the video is the county’s department systems specialist, who was closing down an imprinter at the end of the work day, as required by Nevada state law. The specialist was also verifying that office laptops were shut down for the day and that the spreadsheets on them were complete. The laptops have Excel spreadsheets that track the groups of mail-in ballots and what bins they are in, so that when a risk-limiting audit is performed, the election officials know what bin a certain group of ballots is in, Drysdale said.
There is no tallying of votes on those computers, she added.
“This video is not proof of fraud, it’s proof of an elections official doing his job and ensuring that the secure equipment shuts down properly and that data is accounted for properly,” Drysdale said in an email. “It’s proof of a secure election.”
The county had cameras running in the ballot room 24/7 from the first day of early voting through the completion of the counting of the ballots, Drysdale said.
Calls left with Gilbert for comment were not returned.
Gilbert is paying $191,000 for a statewide recount of ballots and has said he had proof that he won the election.
