Have you ever worried about what happens to your ballot after you drop it in the mail?
You’re not alone. Recent events have many Nevadans questioning the accuracy of our state’s automatic mail-in voting system.
Earlier this week, a former postal worker named Vicki Stuart pled guilty to stealing ballots during the 2024 presidential election.
Stuart, who is 64, admitted to one count of identity theft and one count of forgery. While this case happened in Colorado, it shows how easily our mail voting systems can be exploited.
“I feel like I am guilty for the part that I played in it,” Stuart told the judge when asked why she accepted the plea agreement.
This troubling case should make us all think about Nevada’s own mail-in ballot system.
Since 2022, our state has been sending ballots to every active registered voter, whether they asked for one or not. This automatic system sounds convenient, but it creates real problems.
The biggest issue? Our voter rolls – the lists of who gets ballots – are often wrong.
Nevada is a “highly transient state” where people move frequently, but election officials aren’t always told when someone moves away.
This means ballots get sent to outdated and erroneous addresses all the time.
How bad is it?
In the 2022 elections alone, more than 95,000 mail ballots in Nevada were undeliverable because they were sent to bad or outdated addresses.
Mr. Adams states “I’ve personally visited many addresses on Nevada’s active voter rolls and found vacant lots, abandoned mines, liquor stores, and even a bong shop.”
No voters lived at these places, yet ballots were being sent there – and somehow being returned.
That’s a lot of ballots floating around that could end up in the wrong hands.
One Las Vegas resident shared her story with the Review-Journal last year.
“I received postcard mailings from several political organizations regarding how to fill out a mail-in ballot,” she wrote. “The problem? The names weren’t mine, the people named didn’t live here.”
She wondered where those ballots actually went.
Our state officials know there’s a problem.
Just last year, Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar announced that nearly 8% of Nevada’s active registered voters (over 150,000 people) had official election mail returned as undeliverable.
These voters were moved to “inactive” status, meaning they wouldn’t automatically get mail ballots.
But this clean-up effort happened very late in the game.
The postcards notifying voters of their status change weren’t sent until July 2024, requiring responses by August 6th – approximately 6 weeks before the first mail ballots were sent out for the presidential election.
The system had other hiccups too.
Testing of Nevada’s new voter system revealed errors affecting tens of thousands of voters in Washoe County alone, including voters assigned to wrong precincts and active voters labeled as inactive or vice versa.
If you’re wrongly marked inactive, you don’t get a mail ballot.
Nevada’s Governor Joe Lombardo recognized these problems and proposed some common-sense fixes during the 2023 legislative session.
His plan would have required voters to actually request a mail ballot rather than automatically sending one to every name on the list.
This would have stopped ballots from going to bad addresses and saved taxpayers money. But the Governor’s bill, SB405, never made it out of committee!
In 2022, Nevada spent around $2 million just mailing ballots to bad addresses.
Critics say these concerns are overblown. They point out that signature verification catches many problems.
However, Victor Joecks tested this theory during the 2022 elections and confirmed that problems do exist: signature matching is “an inefficient and inconsistent system,” and mistakes do happen.
In the Colorado case, three of the stolen ballots that were fraudulently cast actually made it through the signature verification process and were counted as legitimate votes.
In conclusion
We shouldn’t have to wonder about the accuracy of election results. Every valid vote should count, and no fraudulent vote should slip through.
Simple fixes like requiring voters to request ballots, keeping voter rolls updated regularly, and adding better security measures – like water marked paper ballots – could make a big difference.
The President’s Executive Order on Elections outlines many of these changes at the federal level. Link to EO.
Think about it. How do web-based retailers, like Amazon, maintain their customer address lists so well?
If they didn’t, you’d be getting the wrong packages from previous residents all the time. And your packages might get delivered to the wrong people!
The answer: they have sophisticated data standards that link to nationwide databases that ensure continuous updates to their client lists.
And they have data entry software that enforces field standardization, data validation of every field, immediate data updates when any authorized person makes a change, and forensic documentation of every field entry and change.
Why aren’t elections officials advocating to use similar approaches and bring voter list management into the 21st century? And just imagine the cost savings!
These aren’t partisan ideas – they’re just good government.
Next time you get your mail-in ballot, be thankful for the convenience. But also ask yourself: How many ballots were sent to empty apartments, old or wrong addresses, or people who have moved away?
In a state where elections are often decided by razor-thin margins, these questions matter to anyone even a bit concerned about election integrity.
This article was written with the assistance of AI. Please verify information and consult additional sources as needed.
