NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — The questions began soon after the doors opened to the public at a sprawling elections office inside a warehouse, and they kept coming until the sky was dark and a cold wind was blowing outside. Hundreds of thousands of ballots for Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, are processed, sorted and counted here, against a backdrop of mountains and desert.
Because elections in America are more fraught than ever, the scrutiny of ballot counting now starts well before Election Day, and the legal challenges have already begun.
The Republican Party and allied groups, many seized by Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about fraud in elections, are training monitors around the country to spot what they see as irregularities at absentee ballot counting centers. The monitors are told to take copious notes, which could be useful for potential court challenges, raising the prospect of a replay in state and local elections of Mr. Trump’s attempt to use the courts to overturn his loss two years ago.
The activity has not produced reports of major disruptions or problems. But on Thursday, local officials were taking no chances at the vote counting center in Clark County: For almost every observer, the elections office had an “ambassador” to escort and observe the observers. Suspicions ran high.
“What are those boxes for?” an older woman in a red coat inquired, pointing to a couple of empty bins. She was sitting behind a glass barrier encircling a cavernous vote tabulation area that had been transformed into a large fishbowl. A county official assured her that he would check; he later said they were used to store damaged ballots. Then she asked why county workers were allowed to bring in bags, fretting that they could be used to smuggle ballots, and was told they were most likely used by the staff to carry in their lunches.
Another observer wanted to know what was written on some blue sticky notes that were too far away to read. (They are used to alphabetize unopened ballots.) And a third, a 61-year-old dental hygienist named Caryl Tunison, asked, “Why do you not have cameras in every area here?” while she paused from writing in a notebook on her lap. She was sitting face to face with a young woman about three yards away, a county worker who sat on the other side of a glass partition and was placing envelopes in a bin.
In a statement, the county elections department said that it “goes above and beyond what the law requires for observation.”
“We recognize the value of helping observers understand the process and responding to their questions, and work to provide answers to their wide variety of questions every day,” the statement read.
Monitoring elections has long been part of the voting process. But this year, the Republican National Committee has worked alongside outside groups like the Election Integrity Network to seek out activists who believe conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and elections in general being corrupted. The Election Integrity Network is a group led by Cleta Mitchell, one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers. It is part of an organization in which Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff during the Trump administration, is a senior partner.
A number of Republican candidates around the country have stated that they may not accept election results if they lose, heightening concerns among many elections experts. But election officials say that they, too, are far better organized this time around. That high level of organization — and the scrutiny from election denial activists — was evident on a recent visit here.
The State of the 2022 Midterm Elections
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.
Many of the observers are people like Ms. Tunison, who believes the 2020 election was stolen and who said she was encouraged in her newfound activism by her pastor. She repeated a conspiracy theory, which circulated on social media after the 2020 election, that several swing states simultaneously halted counting to thwart Donald Trump. “Who was able to call all the counties and get them to stop counting all at once?” she asked.
“I just think the whole system is kind of messed up,” she added in an interview as she was leaving. “We could do much better. I think the whole system should be scrapped and started over with something that’s actually secure.”
And what would it be replaced with? “I’m not exactly sure, but I know that it should be mechanical,” she said, with “no internet access to any machine.” But she also said maybe tabulation could be done with “something like the blockchain,” referring to the same technology that is at the heart of Bitcoin.
Baseless theories about foreign plots to hack voting machines have ricocheted around the right-wing media for two years and have been pushed by well-funded Trump allies, including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.
In fact, there is no evidence of widespread fraud or malfeasance in elections. And while there is a criminal investigation underway of election tampering in Georgia, it is examining the conduct of Mr. Trump and his circle of advisers.
Still, a number of Republican lawyers have primed poll monitors to search for irregularities that could be used to bring legal challenges to the results later on.
That would repeat a strategy used in some states in 2020, but many involved say they are better organized this election cycle. Even as the monitoring was taking place on Thursday in Clark County, a local judge rejected a bid by the R.N.C. to have more representation on panels that verify ballot signatures.
At the Clark County office, ballots come in from polling places and drop boxes and are brought to a loading dock in the back of the warehouse. Then they are moved through a series of stations where observers from the public can view how they are handled.
The number of observers fluctuated throughout the day and into the night. There was a woman in a leather hat complaining that she had been treated rudely by a county worker, a man watching while he twiddled a Rubik’s Cube.
A young man from the R.N.C., who declined to comment, monitored late into the evening, while toting around a book by Ray Dalio, the hedge fund manager, called “The Changing World Order,” which ponders the rise of China and the twilight of America.
Placards throughout the office inform the observers of state law and guidelines. They are prohibited, the placards say, from “talking to workers within the central counting” area or from “advocating for or against a candidate.”
Much of the work is monotonous. In one area, stacks of ballots that had been through a sorting machine were hand counted for verification purposes. Watching the workers count the ballots was a tedious business. One observer, whose hair was pulled back in a pink scrunchie, paused from her own note taking to lean over and whisper to a reporter who was taking his own notes. She offered the friendly admonition of an armchair editor: “It’s going to be a boring article.”
In another room, a group of seven observers watched as ballots were fed through the ballot sorting machine. Those that looked good were put into green bins set out on a long table in the middle of the room. Ballots with signatures that could not be verified using county records were sorted into red bins for further review. The sound of the thrumming machine was not unlike a train going over tracks.
“I was being lulled to sleep,” said Matt Robison, a 60-year-old service technician for a propane company who came with his wife of 39 years, Sandra. They had not come on behalf of any particular group, but because of their own concerns about the last election.
“These people have a job to do, and it looks like they’re doing their job,” said Mr. Robison. “If there’s ballots being shredded or anything like that, there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to see that. But I personally feel like there had been — I don’t know about necessarily in Nevada — but there had been election tampering in 2020. But the thing is I think that what we’re able to witness here shows people doing their jobs.”
Election officials have long hoped that letting skeptics into the process would convince them to reject the conspiracy theories. That seemed a tall order in Clark County.
Mr. Robison described himself as uncomfortable with “woke ideologies” and as a fan of “2000 Mules,” the film promoting conspiracy theories that have been discredited by experts, media outlets and government agencies.
“You know, Dinesh D’Souza’s film?” he said, referring to the film’s director, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to campaign finance fraud. The film’s two star experts, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, were recently jailed for contempt of court.
Still, he was cautious about what he thought about the 2020 election. “Unless I can see it, unless I actually witness something, then I can’t confirm,” he said, adding that if he “put my right hand in the air and swear solemnly to tell the truth and the whole truth,” the “truth would be I don’t know.”
His wife, a gun training instructor, is more strident in her views and has come more often to observe. Her husband said, jokingly, that “she’s addicted.”
Ms. Robison expressed dissatisfaction with the county and the observation process and wanted to see the ballots being unloaded in the back of the building — “the entire chain of custody,” as she put it.
The county elections department said in its statement that its “observation plan was reviewed by the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and upheld by the court before the primary election” and that “this included identifying the areas where observation would be provided.”
For Trump supporters like Ms. Robison, the 2020 election was a catalyst.
“There’s no question in my mind and a lot of other people’s minds that 46 should not be in the White House,” she said, referring to President Biden. “It was a stolen election.”
