As states expand mail voting, Nevada’s 2022 midterm elections offered an alarming case study of close results as they relate to rejected, unreturned, and undeliverable ballots. Nevada’s U.S. Senate race was ultimately called four days late on a margin of 7,928 votes, which determined party control for the chamber.
In 2023, the Secretary of State finally published figures showing that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or “bad” address and another 8,036 were rejected upon receipt. Another 1.2 million ballots never came back to officials for counting. In fact, more mail-in ballots were rejected that the margin of victory in Nevada’s senate race between Republican Adam Laxalt and the “winner”, Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto.
To determine whether a ballot is authentic, Nevada processes them via signature verification. This means election officials compare signatures on file to those on return envelopes to determine whether ballots are accepted. Such a system has a lot of room for human error, however. This is why states like Minnesota and Florida also require the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number on return envelopes so they’re not solely relying on signature verification to determine legitimacy.
Nevada is one of eight states that allow all elections to be conducted by mail. While the Silver State originally allowed a temporary expansion of vote-by-mail during the 2020 general election over coronavirus concerns, in 2021, then-Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak made it the permanent law of the land, requiring election officials to send out mail-in ballots to all of the state’s registered voters. And of course, that taints election integrity.
Did you know that:
- Nevada Automatically Sent 95,556 Ballots to ‘Undeliverable or Bad Addresses’
- More Nevada Ballots Were Rejected than the Difference Between Winner/Loser in Senate Race
- Mass Mail Elections Invite Massive Postage Waste
- 71.5% of Nevada’s Mail Ballots Went Unaccounted for in November 2022
According to PILF President, J. Christian Adams:
“Mass-mail elections disenfranchise. Nevada can do a better job in reducing rejected ballots. Auto mass-mail will continue to waste money and disenfranchise voters until it is fixed.”
And he’s right. If we instituted a system of Voter ID where only paper ballots were allowed, on same day – in person – voting with no ballot harvesting allowed, perhaps we’d have a better system of election integrity where we can determine the true winner of an election? Who doesn’t want that?
You can read the full report here from the Public Interest Legal Foundation.