Print It. Stuff It. Mail It. Trash It? Nevada Taxpayers Pay Either Way.
Remember the old record-and-tape clubs?
(If you don’t, ask a “Boomer.”)
Columbia House would send you 12 albums for a penny. Then every month, a new album automatically showed up in your mailbox.
Unless you remembered to mail back that little card saying no.
Miss the deadline, and you owned it. Along with the bill.
But even the record-and-tape clubs had to play by one rule: You had to sign up first.
The Federal Trade Commission made sure of that back in 1973. Nobody could put you in the club without your say-so.
Since then, Congress and state lawmakers have gone even further.
Businesses today have to get your clear consent before enrolling you in anything you pay for. And they have to make it easy to quit.
Consent comes first, not after the fact.
Now look at what Nevada’s doing with mail ballots.
Under a 2021 law Democrats passed on a party-line vote, the state signs everybody up automatically.
Every active registered voter gets a ballot in the mail. Whether they asked for one or not.
Don’t want one? It’s on you to find the opt-out form and send it in at least 60 days before the election.
That’s about 2.08 million ballots going out right now, according to the Secretary of State’s latest numbers.
And who’s paying? All of us.
Sure, voting is a right, not a purchase. But printing and mailing 2 million ballots isn’t free. Every Nevada taxpayer chips in for every ballot. Whether you use yours or not.
So how many actually get used?
In 2022, the last midterm, Nevada mailed out 1,873,813 ballots. Only 528,753 came back. That’s a return rate of just 28.2 percent.
Dead last in the nation, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Even California did better.
If voters return ballots at the same rate this year, about 588,000 will come back. Roughly 1.5 million won’t.
What does that cost taxpayers?
The state said each mail ballot cost $1.46 to print and mail in 2020.
The next year, then-Deputy Secretary of State Mark Wlaschin testified that rising costs would push it to $2.97 per ballot.
His office warned the state and counties “would incur significant costs each election cycle.” He was right.
Multiply those costs by 1.5 million unused ballots. You get somewhere between $2.2 million and $4.4 million in taxpayer money.
Up to $4.4 million. For ballots nobody used.
Plenty of those folks voted in person. Good for them.
But they never needed a mail ballot. And they’d still get a sample ballot in the mail, so they’d know exactly what’s on the ballot.
Here’s where it gets worse.
In 2022, more than 95,000 ballots went to bad addresses, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. That’s nearly 5 percent of the active voter list.
Every one of those was printed, stuffed and mailed to nowhere. On the taxpayers’ dime.
Citizen Outreach’s Pigpen Project has been working to help clean outdated registrations off Nevada’s voter rolls since the 2020 election.
But Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s office has fought our involvement every step of the way.
Every bad registration left on the rolls means another ballot mailed to an empty apartment. Or to someone who moved to Arizona three years ago. Or someone who died.
And Democrats want to lock this system in for good.
Last November, during a special session, they passed SJR 1 to write automatic mail ballots into the Nevada Constitution. No hearing. Party-line vote.
If the 2027 Legislature passes it again, it goes on the 2028 ballot.
Once it’s in the constitution, fixing this waste gets a whole lot harder.
Even the record-and-tape clubs had to ask first. Nevada should too.
Want a mail ballot? Ask for one. You’ll get it.
And taxpayers can stop paying for ballots nobody wanted or uses.
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