2020 was the first time Nevada’s elections were conducted by mass vote by mail. 2020 should have been the last time Nevada relied on the U.S. Post Office to run an election. Unfortunately, the state still automatically sends ballots in the mail to every active registrant on the state’s voter roll.
Photos from 2020 showed mail ballots blowing in the winds on Nevada roads. Some went to vacant lots and mines. Others ended up in landfills.
But the automatic vote-by-mail experiment did not end in 2020. It continued to wreak havoc on Nevada’s 2022 elections.
According to data from the Nevada secretary of state, over 95,000 mail ballots were returned as undeliverable, meaning they went to the wrong address and never reached the intended recipient. Another more than 8,000 mail ballots were rejected by election officials. These ballots could have been rejected for many reasons including failing signature matching, a voter failing to sign the ballot, or the ballot arriving too late.
To put these figures into perspective, the Nevada U.S. Senate race was decided by 7,928 votes. When you send more ballots to faulty addresses than the difference between a key statewide race, that is a core system failure.
Despite these problems, Nevada will continue in 2024 to mail a ballot to every active registrant on the voter roll. To run an election by automatic vote by mail requires near-perfect voter rolls.
Spoiler alert: Nevada still has thousands of errors on its voter roll. Yet, this faulty list will be used to mail ballots automatically.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation identified hundreds of some of the most questionable addresses listed as residences on the voter roll. These commercial addresses where it appears no one could reasonably live include strip clubs, casinos, fast food restaurants, 7-Elevens, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and even the Las Vegas Airport. This is important because, under Nevada law, people are required to register to vote where they actually live.
Nevada election officials are failing to investigate obvious commercial addresses and fix errors on the voter roll. If these addresses remain on the voter roll, ballots will be mailed to these addresses where no one lives.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has filed a petition for mandamus to force Washoe County Election Clerk Carrie-Ann Burgess, after years of failing to identify commercial addresses, to investigate and resolve these problems on the voter roll. The foundation is putting other counties on notice that if they don’t resolve improper commercial addresses on their voter rolls, they will be on the chopping block next.
These serious errors on Nevada’s voter roll have to be addressed before ballots for the 2024 election hit the mail.
Automatically sending a mail-in ballot to all registered voters is the worst way to run an election. By doing this, Nevada has put the U.S. Post Office in charge of its elections.
We shouldn’t put the Post Office in a position of power to decide election outcomes. I get my neighbors’ mail far too often to make that bet.
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Elections should be conducted with transparency in person. Unfortunately, elections with razor-thin margins mean chance, and the competency of the Post Office plays a role in the outcome. Nevada deserves better.
Before the 2024 election, Nevada should change its laws to move away from the automatic vote-by-mail system. But if changing from the automatic vote by mail to a request model fails to pass in Carson City, then at the very least, the counties can remove the vacant lots, strip clubs, casinos, gas stations, and fast food restaurants from the voter roll.
J. Christian Adams is the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and the current commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights.