(Aug. 13) -- A state order is forcing Clark County's Election Department to hire extra employees to verify signatures. Those employees will be scrambling to meet a tight deadline.
Secretary of State Dean Heller says a petition to roll back last year's $800 million dollar state tax increase received 90% of the valid signatures needed to put the measure on the November ballot.
Under state law, that threshold allows for every petition signature to be verified. On Tuesday, Heller ordered county election officials to start counting to avoid possible court action by petition organizers.
"Rather than have a court make that decision the Secretary wanted to be proactive and go ahead and have the clerks do this action and verify every single signature," said Steve George, a spokesman for Secretary Heller
"In Clark County they turned in a little over 46,000." Clark County Election Supervisor Larry Lomax will have to hire 16 people and work them 16 hours a day to get the verification done by the end of the month.
"It's extremely labor intensive. In fact, I would say our election department is operating at max capacity now because over the last month we've received over 50,000 voter registration forms." This in addition to preparing for the Sept. primary election and early voting begins next week. "So we got plenty going on without this."
To verify the petition, every name on the list of over 46,000 will have to be cross checked with a voter registration database. It takes a lot of time, and Lomax wishes it didn't have to be done.
Lomax says he doesn't know what the final cost of the voter verification will be. The man behind the "Ax The Tax" petition is Republican activist George Harris. We tried to contact him for his thoughts but he did not return our phone calls.
