S3E25: Hand Counting in Nye County, Nevada with Former Clerk Mark Kampf

In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Mark Kampf, the former clerk in Nye County, Nevada. He stepped into the role in the summer of 2022 after the Nye County Commission voted to move to hand counting ballots and his predecessor resigned.

That fall, Kampf proposed a plan for Nye County to hand count during the midterm elections, which faced a legal challenge from the ACLU (link to https://news3lv.com/news/local/nye-county-clerk-tempers-hand-count-expectations-calls-it-a-test), and ultimately served as a parallel trial of hand counting. In March 2024, Kampf resigned from the position of Nye County Clerk.

They spoke about these hand counting efforts, as well as Kampf’s work to beef up chain of custody processes during his tenure in office.

High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson

Transcription of the episode is as follows:

Mark Kampf: Because we use paper ballots at the polls, everything is counted the same way that the mail ballots are counted. So, by having paper ballots – and we’re the only county in the state of Nevada that uses all paper ballots, both at – for mail and at the polls, and that was something that I implemented.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]

Eric Fey: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of High Turnout, Wide Margins. My name is Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri. I’m here with my co-host –

Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon. I’m the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri.

Eric Fey: And today, our guest, Mark, if you want to introduce yourself.

Mark Kampf: Yes, my name is Mark Kampf, formerly [a] clerk in Nye County, Nevada.

Eric Fey: Mark, thanks for agreeing to do this with us today. And the way we start every episode, the nearly 100 we’ve done, we always ask folks, “How did they end up working in elections?”

Mark Kampf: Well, it was some arm twisting, really. My background is in accounting and audit and working with large data sets. And after retirement, I was happily studying other things. I started doing voice acting and built a studio, and then the COVID hit, and all that shut down pretty much.

So, with the – our clerk was getting ready to retire, and some of the folks in the county were concerned that they would not have the right person in that job. And so, I was asked to run, and was supported, and ended up, you know, a two-year process of running for clerk. I was appointed clerk before I actually started the job because our clerk was upset because they were asked to do – she was asked to implement paper ballots, and as a result, she quit. So I was elected to do that and to attempt a hand count.

Brianna Lennon: Can you just for, I guess, context, tell us a little bit about your county and like, how big it is, how many voters it has?

Mark Kampf: Yeah, Nye County is actually the third largest county in the United States, 18,000 square miles. It’s huge. To get from one polling location to the other – to the furthest one away – is a six hour drive, just to put it all in perspective. And then, we have one that we have to do. It’s an Indian reservation that is literally a seven and a half hour drive to get to because you have to take gravel roads to get to it. But in the state of Nevada, if an Indian tribe wants to have an on-site polling location, no matter how many people they’ve got, we do that for them.

So, yeah, it’s a pretty big, big operation here in Nye County. Nye County has around 54,000 people, around 33,000 registered voters who are active. And we have, of course, quite a few inactive registered voters because we have motor voter law and people get registered to vote that could care less. It’s largely Republican. 56% of the population is – of the voters are Republican. About 19% are Democrat, and the rest are non-partisans. We have one large population center, which is Pahrump, which is around 44,000 but the rest are everywhere else. We have around 33 precincts. The largest of the precincts has about 4,000 people in it and the smallest of the precincts has about 12. And those are some of the more remote precincts that we have to account for. So, it is a pretty diverse operation.

The we – our county seat actually is three hours from our major population center, which is Pahrump. And so, the clerk traditionally was up in the county seat. I was moving that back to Pahrump to make it more efficient, and the clerk who took over after I left moved it back to Tonopah. And so as a result, I was able to get the results out from – starting at my first time, which was in Tonopah at 1:30 in the evening, at night, in the morning, I guess. And when I moved it to Tonopah, we were done by 10, I mean, back to Pahrump, [a] major population center. We were done by 10 o’clock in the evening. 99% counted. And so, now we’re back to Tonopah, and it took three days to get the votes done. They had 10,000 ballots to count after two days after the election. So hey, call me a wacky guy.

Brianna Lennon: Is Nevada a primarily vote in-person on Election Day state? Or is it like a mix?

Mark Kampf: It is, well, because they implemented the universal mail-in ballots in the state of Nevada. In other words, every active voter gets a ballot. Inactive voters have to show up in person. So in other words, if you haven’t voted in the last election, you’re made inactive, okay. And so, those people have to show up in person. But I would say roughly, it’s about a 56% utilization of the mail-in ballots overall. It – now because we use paper ballots at the polls, everything is counted the same way that the mail ballots are counted.

So by having paper ballots – and we’re the only county in the state of Nevada that uses all paper ballots, both at – for the mail and at the polls. And that was something that I implemented within a three month period of time. And actually, I find it a very efficient process because in most counties in the state of Nevada, you got 56% of, let’s say, the ballots that you’re counting using a tabulator, and the other 50% or 44% you’re using the little cards from your touchscreen machines, your little USBs. And so, you had two different methodologies of counting. And so, that’s a lot of USBs to pass around, and they’re pretty slow to upload and put in. They take some time, whereas I think the tabulation process is much more quick. A better audit trail for sure, than the little rolls of tape that come out of those VVPATs that the state’s using.

And so, it was very well received with the voters in this county. They loved it. Of course, there were certain groups who, when they had their precious machines taken away from them, showed up en masse to use the machines at least reserved for people who had some sort of disability and needed the machine. Because by law, we had to have at least one machine in every location, so that we had to at least have one vote – one in the county. But that wouldn’t have gone over too well if somebody had to drive six hours to use their machine because they were blind, so we had one of those in each location for people to use.

And initially, when we implemented the paper ballots, we went from – was it 19 people using the, you know, machine that was for disabilities, for vision impaired, to 264 people using the machines, so it was a little bit of a protest vote nevertheless. But that’s okay. You know, we weren’t allowed to ask people questions whether or not they – whether they were disabled or not. You want to use the machine – have at it, but most people wanted to use the paper ballots.

Eric Fey: So Mark, just so I understand when you went to paper ballots in all the polling locations. So it’s a paper ballot, the voter fills it out by hand. Do they then put it through a scanner of some type, or do you bring it all back to the clerk’s office and count them centrally?

Mark Kampf: Bring them back to the clerk’s office and count them centrally, just put them in a ballot box and then we sort them out. Everything, you know, any [of] those boxes were transported by the sheriff’s office. So, you know, I didn’t have any concerns about that. Ideally, we would want to do that. But, you know, we’re not a very rich county here, a lot of retirees. There’s really no industry other than gold and silver mining to speak of. Of course, you know, in our county. Of course, Nevada is Las Vegas and everything else, but in our county it’s pretty, you know, [a] pretty poor county.

So what we did see was we were able to cut out the fees that we were paying. We had 130 machines. We only reserved 30 for the work. So that was 100 machines we were paying those annual fees on, which is pretty expensive, you know. And actually, the paper ballots without requiring us to have those machines was actually a lower cost operation for our county.

Eric Fey: So it sounds like, from your initial remarks, your predecessor had resigned over this so it sounds like there was an impetus for this transition. And I’m wondering if you could – I’m hoping you could explain to anybody who might listen to this, kind of what led up to your appointment in terms of these machines and the ballots and everything. And that decision, and what was going on in Nye County at that point.

Mark Kampf: When I was running, I had intended in just going on and taking over the job and doing the job as it was structured. Part way through the process, one of the county commissioners had asked Jim Marchant, who was running for secretary of state and who was a nationwide speaker on doing paper ballots and hand counting. And he had convinced one of the commissioners to put it on the agenda to have Nye County go to paper ballots and hand count. And it was put on the agenda, and the commissioners approved it five to nothing.

Well, [the] clerk has control over that. You can’t tell the clerk in our county how to do the elections. So, she was going to retire anyhow, and she said enough. She quit, and I was appointed with three months to go to the election to implement a paper ballot process and a hand count. And I got the paper ballots done and would have done the hand count had I not been sued by the ACLU to stop the process. But nevertheless, so with those marching orders and being, you know, the person that I am, I was able to organize to get, get the paper ballots plenty of in time.

[I] had no problem with that process. Came up with a strategy for how to keep track of them. Because, you know, getting secure paper late in the game, getting paper that’s got security features in it was a little late in the game. And so, I basically used a numbering process that didn’t relate to the voter in any way, just a sequential numbering process to keep track of ballots – make sure that none went missing. And we were actually able to reconcile within eight ballots, which I thought was pretty good. And a lot of it was just somebody getting handed the wrong ballot or something like that. It was not a major issue whatsoever.

By the time we did it the second time, we were reconciled to one ballot. We were off somewhere, but it was actually a pretty easy process, and we were able to refine it to make it even simpler in the future. So, works pretty easy. You don’t have a whole lot of machines around. You don’t have to, you know, you take a box of paper with – by precinct to the polling location and you hand it to poll, so. Works pretty good.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]

Brianna Lennon: So, I think you brought up a really excellent point that I was wondering if you could just kind of elaborate on, because when you – because you mentioned like, you have to have constant vigilance when you have voter registration systems in particular. But really with anything, and we have so much that has been, I think, I don’t want to say taken for granted. It hasn’t been taken for granted. But like processes as elections have become more in the spotlight and everything, there wasn’t an acknowledgment in a lot of offices that those were things that we had to take into account.

We, in our county, pull down a copy for our own files every night of our voter registration database, so that we have our own copy on our own server. So that if anything happens, we have that. And before election day, we print a paper copy of everything so that we have that as well. And I think there’s a little bit now of recognition that that is not an out of line thing or a too cautious type thing. It should just be a normal thing. And I’m wondering if you can talk about how it was received in your office. Or things like that, when you started trying to work on those, like monitoring type things.

Mark Kampf: I think that the monitoring was a difficult thing for a lot of folks, as far as the controls that you need. First, for example, we’d have as much problem with the poll pads and the monitoring of the voter registration. Okay, that was a daily process that they went through. They felt that they had adequate security. I didn’t think so. For example, all the monitors that [have] access to the voter registration system was on everybody’s plain old work laptop. Okay, so basically, what you’ve got is your portal to our voter registration system should somebody click on the wrong email.

First thing I did was take that offline, so you had a separate laptop – your voter registration system from your work thing, so there were no emails on this. There was no way to access this from the outside world. So that was a tough thing for people to get used to because they didn’t like having to have an extra laptop to keep that security. But nowadays, I’ve seen – I’ve done it. Click on the wrong link and your life is never the same, right? When you lose all your emails and everything crashes because somebody went in and did it.

Well, I don’t want to have that happen. Same thing with regard to managing the paper ballots as they come in the door through the mail. You know, when you’re getting 17,000 ballots coming through in the mail for 35 different precincts, and you got to keep track of all that stuff. And you’ve got to make sure that you’re reconciling your ballots to your check in. They didn’t understand the reconciliation process very clearly, and things got out of hand. And I caught it, fortunately, because I was on top of it. But, it was hard to get people to follow a discipline over basic ballot controls and ballot handling controls okay because they’re just floating all over the darn place. Yours and you went through, you scan it, you’re already there, right? You’re done.

You can take it, put it in the pile with everything else because you’ve already scanned it, right? You just put it in the box and, “Okay, I can find the days for that scanner. I can find that ballot if I need to, right?” Whereas, when you – they’re all coming through the mail, and you got to break things down by precinct so that you can find it later. And then, you got to match that up by precinct to the check in, so that when you separate that ballot from the envelope, you know that that person’s ballot is the right one and it is there. So that process was very weak. And so, they had lost – I had noticed in the past they’d lost track of that.

Well anyhow, I wasn’t gonna let that happen because, you know, being an auditor and an accountant from my background, I wanted to make sure things [were] balanced. You know, you don’t lose any vote whatsoever. And so, that was a hard thing for people to adapt to when they went to this universal mail-in ballot process. And then, we compounded that by getting rid of the machines that made it very easily. It was a USB. They didn’t have to do much. So, it made [it] a little bit more of a challenge. And it was that mentality you had to change, the trust but verify. There was a lot of trust going on, but not a lot of verifying.

Eric Fey: It sounds like, Mark, you implemented a number of changes in your office after you took office. I’m curious – somebody who had a career it sounds like in the private sector, or you were doing something other than working in election administration, that’s for sure. It’s in – from my experience, it’s hard to fully understand and appreciate what goes into administering an election if you really haven’t done it before. I’m curious what your perception of what the job was going to be match? Versus the reality of the job was? When you got into office, was it what you expected, or was it a whole different set of things that you had to deal with?

Mark Kampf: Well, the process was what I expected, because I did a lot of homework. Okay, before I got into that job, I knew everything about the process. I studied it. I knew where the voters were. I knew the precinct breakdowns. I knew where the problems were. I did my homework. You know, what I didn’t count on was people. And I came from a world where, in the corporate world I was controller of BP’s Alaskan oil operation, okay? I was Director of Audit Operations for the Americas, for the largest recovery audit firms in the world. My clients were Apple and Pepsi and Pfizer and FedEx and these big boys who, you know, we were working with people who were motivated, had, you know, a desire to do well.

And then, when you get to folks who had been doing things a certain way for so many years under the same clerk. The clerk was there for 22 years, and most of the staff had been around for 10 to 15 years. Change was hard because, you know, I was used to, “Hey, we got something to get done. We’re working.” You know, I’ll work 24 hours a day if I had to to get the job done. Didn’t matter. It’s part of my background. And so, that was, the biggest challenge is not the process. Because the process, to me, is you’re counting votes, you’re counting dollars. It didn’t matter. You have to have internal controls over everything and that was my background – was internal control. And so, transitioning to a clerk in the internal control, it was actually pretty easy. Learning the law, you know, is another thing altogether.

Brianna Lennon: And I was wondering, if you could touch on because you said, I’m sure that a large portion of some of the resistance was specific to hand counting and things like that. And you know, you hear like 30,000 ballots. It doesn’t sound egregious, like, when you’re trying to figure out how to put in a system, especially after talking to places like Georgia that had to do things. What was the process that you were planning to kind of like do? Was it still going to be like a central count system? Was it going to be counting at the – with the distance between polling places like, what was the thought process?

Mark Kampf: Well, I was in the process of moving everything to Pahrump because it was – no sense in having the tail wag the dog. You know, why have the counting happen in a town with 1,800 people versus the town with 44,000 people, when you need resources to do the polls and the back office work. The resources in Pahrump were plentiful. Resources in Tonopah were not plentiful. So, you know, there was a lot of resistance to that.

And I had actually, because there was no end in sight to the paper ballots, because of the people that are running our state, I convinced the state to let me get a half million dollars for a mail processing machine so that we could get the ballots through quicker. And that was all going to go into Pahrump. But, you know, the county did not want to spend, you know, $25,000 to fit out an office, and gave me trouble with regard to the resources I needed to do it, which would have saved the county money. And at the end, politics got involved. And so, now they’ve got the process happening in Tonopah. It took three days, and they had 10,000 ballots left to count out of the 33 that they got in. And so, they get what they deserve.

Eric Fey: You’ve been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I’m your host, Eric Fey alongside Brianna Lennon. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.