I’m deeply disappointed with Governor Sisolak of Nevada, who saw fit to sign AB4. I had hoped that he’d veto this highly-partisan election reform bill that passed the legislature in a rushed special session on a strict part-line vote.
For those who are unaware, AB4 allows for the governor to declare a health emergency, thereby forcing a different set of rules on the Secretary of State for a pending election. For instance, due to the coronavirus pandemic the State of Nevada will send a mail-in ballot to every registered voter’s last known address. Perfectly reasonable, right? Well, almost…
The law also makes significant changes to current election law “…in order to align all the provisions and make them uniform in their operation for Nevada’s elections…” (a fancy way of saying “we needed to make a change that you might not need or like and we didn’t want you to notice”). These changes include the introduction of ballot harvesting to Nevada elections, an activity that was previously prohibited. This allows anyone – even partisan political operatives – to collect up and deliver ballots to the post office or directly to the registrar. These ballot harvesters are not required to identify themselves to either the voter, post office or the registrar, and no records are kept of their activities or which ballots they pick up and/or deliver. This means that if any suspicions of vote tampering arise there will be no way to identify the likely suspects. It effectively breaks the chain of ballot custody and opens the door for widespread and rampant fraud.
Yes, yes, I know; “experts” claim that voter fraud is rare. But we are moving to mail-in ballots on a scale never before attempted. Do we really want to weaken security at the same time by allowing unknown individuals to handle our ballots? What would you say if the registrar allowed random people for whom they had no information and who were not required to identify themselves to handle your ballot at a precinct polling location? Would you find that acceptable? If not, then why should ballot harvesting be acceptable?
The argument made by democrats is that some voters would be unable to return their ballots without help. A few critical points to make on this claim:
1) If a voter received their ballot via the mail, then they can return it by mail, too. They only have to place it back in the mail box. No one who received their mailed ballot can possibly be prevented from returning it the same way. While in the mail system the ballot will be protected by federal law, discouraging theft or tampering.
2) If there are some few people who are unable to return their ballot via the same mail system that delivered it, the number will be exceedingly small. With such a small number of ballots to harvest, there is no reason why the ballot harvester should not be required to identify themselves on the ballot envelope as having picked up and delivered the ballot and to register with the registrar as a ballot harvester. The registrar or post office should refuse to accept any harvested ballots without the harvester having identified themselves to the registrar and on each ballot itself. This will at least preserve a chain of custody that can be used later to investigate any possible wrongdoings.
3) Each ballot should have a unique identifier that the voter can use to look up their vote online and confirm that their vote was delivered and counted. I’m sure the ballots are uniquely identified (at least I hope so!!), so this would not be much of a change for the system. Remember, it’s easy to claim that voter fraud is rare if you make it impossible to detect!
The reality is that no one who can receive a mailed ballot can be prevented from returning it the same way, so vote harvesting is simply unnecessary. But with the state of Nevada mailing a ballot to everyone’s last known mailing address, I can see a lot of potentially mis-delivered ballots falling into the wrong hands. Couple this with the elimination of the chain of ballot custody enabled by vote harvesting and I see the potential for widespread fraud with no possibility of ever detecting that it took place.
I can’t help but think that the democrats who passed AB4 know all this, too. In fact, I think they’re counting on it.