More ballots were rejected than the margin of victory in Nevada’s contested U.S. Senate race, a new report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) outlines.
According to data from Nevada’s Secretary of State: 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable addresses, 8,036 were rejected by election officials, and 1.2 million ballots were never returned to be counted.
To put the figures in perspective, Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto defeated Republican challenger Adam Laxalt by 7,928 votes — less than the 8,036 ballots rejected upon receipt by election officials.
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 past midterm election season, for example, a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist tricked election officials into accepting six ballots with his signature (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.
As such, Nevada
