NV Failed Mass Mail-In Ballot Experiment Shouldn’t Be A Blueprint

You would think that with all the new technology nowadays our voting and election process would be reliable and effective. That is not the case in Nevada, where it took a lawsuit to force a Clark County election official to clean up the voter rolls.

What should have been a one-time failed experiment of automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter in 2020 is now the norm. The automatic mass mailing of ballots sounds nice. The reality is that it sent ballots to strip clubs, casinos, and bars.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (of which I am president) photographed hundreds of commercial addresses listed as residences on the Nevada voter roll. Some of these addresses included a Sonic Drive-In, the Las Vegas Airport, a 7-Eleven gas station, vacant lots, Binion’s casino, and the Larry Flynt Hustler club.

We delivered this information, including pictures of the locations where it appeared people did not live, to Clark County Registrar of Voters Lorena Portillo. All we wanted her to do was investigate these addresses and, if her office found that no one lived at these addresses, make corrections to the voter roll before the 2024 presidential election ballots hit the mail. 

We waited for a response, but weeks of crickets from Clark County forced us to file a lawsuit. As a direct result of this litigation, Clark County investigated and made corrections to the voter roll — ensuring mail ballots will not be sent to commercial addresses where no one lives.

This is not the first time Nevada has had problems with its automatic vote-by-mail system. According to government data, in 2020 more than 92,000 mail ballots in Clark County alone were returned as undeliverable, meaning they had a wrong or outdated address. To put this figure into perspective, President Joe Biden only carried the state by a little more than 33,000 votes.

Maybe you’re willing to give Nevada election officials a pass for the first time they tried pushing an election to the mail — after all, it was during an unprecedented pandemic. But things got worse in 2022. In the 2022 midterms, more than 95,000 mail ballots statewide were undeliverable. The state’s key U.S. Senate race was decided by less than 8,000 votes.

These types of figures don’t scream confidence in the election process. They make me long for the days when they kept ballots locked up at polling places and not with the U.S. Postal Service. Not only is there an election security concern about nearly 100,000 live ballots going to addresses where the voter does not live, but there are also concerns about mail ballots delaying election results.

I’m old enough to remember when we would know who our next president was going to be on election night. Unfortunately, that golden era of elections seems to be over. Now we have “Election Month,” or more accurately, months. Mass vote-by-mail is the driving factor behind why Americans will likely go to bed on election night not knowing if the next president is Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Thanks to the expansion of mail voting, many states, including Nevada, now accept mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. It’s hard to call an election when ballots can arrive days and, in some states, even weeks after election night. “Election Month” undermines the consent of the governed. As long as states like Nevada push their elections to the mail and accept mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, election results will be delayed.

Automatic vote-by-mail is the absolute worst election system in the United States. Surely it isn’t worth it.

J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.