The swing state’s Democratic secretary of state wants unmarked mail-in ballots to be counted until the Friday after the election.
The swing state’s Democratic secretary of state wants unmarked mail-in ballots to be counted until the Friday after the election.
T he Nevada supreme court has ruled that election officials can count mail ballots with no postmark that are received as many as three days after Election Day.
In the 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a Mexican bandit boasts to Humphrey Bogart’s adventurer character that “we don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!” The Nevada supreme court is, in effect, saying, “We don’t need no postmarks” to declare that a ballot that arrives after Election Day is valid.
The Silver State is this year’s poster child for brazen attempts to undermine election integrity. Nevada is one of the nation’s seven swing states, where the likely winner of the presidential race is very much in doubt. A key U.S. Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen and military veteran Sam Brown is also on the ballot.
Overall, states have improved their election-integrity safeguards since the chaotic 2020 election, when health officials and governors unilaterally issued Covid-19 rules that undermined the security of mail-in ballots and reduced signature-verification checks. But a few states have slid backwards and provide less election security than ever. The worst culprit is Nevada, which, in 2021, thanks to the Democratic legislature and governor, became an election-law Wild West.
State law still requires that all mail ballots be postmarked by Election Day in order to be counted. But the U.S. Postal Service acknowledges that “in the normal course of operations, the Postal Service does not postmark, or ‘cancel’ every piece of mail.” It says it will “try” to ensure that every returned mail-in ballot is postmarked but admits that some might not be. Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state wants unmarked mail-in ballots to be counted until the Friday after the election.
Because Nevada automatically mails a ballot to every active voter on the state’s notoriously error-prone registration list, this is a recipe for disaster. There’s no guarantee that your ballot won’t be stolen right out of your mailbox. And there’s no guarantee that your ballot will be postmarked unless you personally go to a post office and request it. There is little to stop an undeliverable ballot from being used by someone other than the person to whom it’s addressed.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) found that, in the 2020 presidential election, 92,000 ballots were sent to the wrong address in Clark County (which includes Las Vegas). It discovered that voters were registered at casinos, vacant lots, gas stations, strip clubs, business parks, and fast-food joints. Threatening a lawsuit, they forced unwilling Las Vegas election officials to remove commercial addresses from the rolls. But other counties have not complied. PILF also found that Nevada’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, which was decided by a margin of 7,928 votes and determined party control of Congress’s upper chamber, was riddled with irregularities. Nevada’s secretary of state admitted that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or “bad” addresses.
J. Christian Adams, the president of PILF, told me that “vote by mail is the worst way to run an election. It leads to chaos and even disenfranchisement. We don’t want the Postal Service running our elections.” But, sadly, in the swing state of Nevada this year, voters are going to have to trust Lady Luck and the post office for an accurate result.