Reno, NV (AP) — The top elections official in Nye County, who was in charge of a controversial hand-count in the 2022 midterms, is resigning.
The reason for Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf’s resignation was not clear. The letter only said he was resigning effective March 31, and a county spokesperson could not confirm on Thursday the reason for his resignation.
Kampf declined to comment when reached over the phone by The Associated Press.
He stepped into the position in the wake of the Nye County Commission unanimously voting in support of ditching voting machines as conspiracies of a stolen 2020 election spread. The commission wanted every vote counted by hand, a request that made the county one of the first jurisdictions in the nation to act tangibly on election conspiracies, causing the old county clerk to resign.
Kampf ended up conducting a hand-count, but it looked vastly different than the original plan to make hand-counting the county’s primary method. The county used machines as the primary vote-counting method with a hand-count happening alongside, essentially acting as a test run for future elections.
The hand-count started in late October 2022 but was stopped after its second day due to a legal challenge by the ACLU and a subsequent order from the secretary of state’s office. The count could not resume until after polls closed.
Hand-counting is mostly used in small townships across New England and rural Wisconsin. As of the 2022 midterms, there were 658 jurisdictions in the continental U.S. that relied exclusively on hand-counting, with the vast majority having fewer than 2,000 registered voters, according to data from Verified Voting, a group that tracks voting equipment across states.
The most populous county in the continental U.S. to use only hand-counting was Owyhee County, Idaho, which had 6,315 registered voters as of 2020. Nye County had over 33,000 total registered voters at the time.