(Photo: April Corbin Girnus)
The Nevada Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court’s decision that election offices should accept and count mail ballots received after Election Day.
Nevada state law specifies that mail ballots without postmarks or with illegible postmarks should be accepted and counted if they are received by county election offices up to three days after Election Day. (Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day should be accepted and counted if received by county election officials up to four days after Election Day.)
The Republican National Committee and former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed a lawsuit in May challenging the law on non-postmarked ballots received after Election Day. They sought an injunction to prevent the counting of these ballots in the upcoming general election. Their request for an injunction was denied in early August, and they appealed to the state’s high court.
Among their claims, the RNC and Trump argued that the acceptance of non-postmarked ballots disproportionately harms Republicans because they vote by mail less significantly than Democrats.
The Nevada Supreme Court noted in its opinion, which was posted by Democracy Docket, that the RNC identified 24 non-postmarked mail ballots that were received by Clark County after this year’s June primary election day, but they provided no evidence regarding the partisan lean of those ballots. The lack of a postmark “occurs as the result of random postal service operations,” the court noted.
A separate lawsuit — filed by the RNC, the Trump campaign and the Nevada State Republican Party — challenging Nevada’s ballot receipt deadline more broadly was dismissed in July and has been appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A decision is still pending.
The Nevada Secretary of State on Monday reported that 342,409 mail ballots have so far been accepted for the general election. Among those, 41.4% were from registered Democrats, 31% from registered Republicans, and 27% from nonpartisans or registered to a third party.
Republicans have targeted mail ballot acceptance procedures in multiple states in the lead up to this year’s presidential election, which is expected to be a tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Voting rights advocates have warned such efforts are part of a larger strategy to sow distrust in the election process.
On Friday, the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals out of New Orleans ruled that Mississippi is violating federal law by allowing for the counting of mail ballots received up to five business days after Election Day, but they stopped short of overturning the Mississippi law being challenged, noting that consideration must be given to “the value of preserving the status quo in a voting case on the eve of an election.”
That ruling is not expected to immediately impact the Nov. 5 election but could be cited in potential post-election litigation.