Assembly leaders of both parties have embraced a bill to ensure that Nevada voters receive sample ballots before mail ballots are distributed. It’s a worthwhile show of bipartisanship even though it does little to address the folly of elections that drag on for days after the polls have closed.
Last week, Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager, a Las Vegas Democrat, added his name to Assembly Bill 148, sponsored by Gregory Hafen, a Republican from Pahrump. The proposal seeks to remedy the confusion some voters felt when they received their mail ballots before their sample ballots. It codifies a timeline for the distribution of each.
This is fine, as far as it goes. But it would be wholly unnecessary if majority Democrats — immersed in self-interest — hadn’t made permanent the universal mail ballot provision imposed as a temporary pandemic emergency measure. A more secure and efficient system would offer mail voting to those who want it rather than sending mail ballots to every Nevada registered voter whether they’ve requested one or not. Utah recently passed legislation along these lines.
AB148 also fails to address the most glaring deficiency in Nevada’s electoral framework: procedures that allow mail ballots — even those that are unpostmarked — to be counted days after the election, which leads to tabulation delays and fuels conspiracy theories. If lawmakers were to start over and design election regulations entirely from scratch, who would propose such lax standards?
Nevada Democrats believe the current laws create advantages they can exploit, and they refuse to budge on prudent reforms such as voter ID, earlier mail-ballot deadlines or limits on ballot harvesting. But the hallmark of a well-functioning election system isn’t whether it provides one major political party or the other with an advantage. It’s whether the rules instill confidence in the integrity of the vote while maximizing voter access and delivering results in a timely manner. Nevada remains lacking in this regard.
Deadlines are integral to any election. Moving cutoff dates up a few days to ensure that valid mail ballots are returned by Election Day would disenfranchise no one given that those who miss the deadline would still be free to vote in person.
But Democrats are less concerned about common-sense election integrity than with securing the upper hand. It’s somewhat surprising that Mr. Yeager even signed on to the minor reform included in AB148.
Gov. Joe Lombardo insisted in his State of the State address that, if legislative Democrats refused to act, he would propose a ballot question calling for the timely counting of mail ballots. He should be prepared to follow through.