Nevada Can Count Mailed Ballots Without Postmark 3 Days After Election Day
Yeah, this isn’t suspicious at all.
The Nevada Supreme Court (NSV) ruled that the state can count all mailed-in ballots, including those without a postmark, up to three days after the election.
Kamala Harris campaign lawyer Marc Elias is hyping his firm’s victory to allow Nevada mail-in ballots to be counted up to *3 days* after the election even if they *don’t* have a postmark on the envelope. https://t.co/WY6QjxHZac
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) October 29, 2024
Nevada counts ballots “postmarked on or before Election Day and received by clerk offices by the fourth day following to be counted.”
The RNC filed a June lawsuit alleging the election officials would count ballots without a postmark.
The RNC cited a deputy secretary of state for elections:
This lawsuit is necessary because the Nevada Deputy Secretary of State for Elections recently testified that this key safeguard of Nevada law will be ignored in upcoming elections and that mail ballots without a postmark will be counted if received up to 3 days after election day. See Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin, testimony before Nevada Advisory Committee on Perspiratory Democracy, April 23, 2024, available at 4/23/2024 – Secretary of State – Advisory Committee 11 on Participatory Democracy – YouTube (starting at 1:30:09).
Carson City District Court Judge James Russell denied the RNC and former President Donald Trump’s request for a preliminary injunction, which would pause counting ballots that did not have a clear postmark.
The Nevada Supreme Court ruling upholds Russell’s decision.
Here are a few of the court’s reasons for counting ballots without a postmark.
The RNC argued that a voter can ensure the ballot has a postmark.
Well, the justices appeared to take the Democrat voter ID argument:
The RNC asserts that a voter can ensure their ballot is postmarked by visiting a post office in person and requesting a postmark from the postal service associate when dropping off their mail ballot. While this may be possible for some voters, it may not be for other groups, such as homebound voters or those who live significantly far away from a post office and thus cannot physically drop off their mail ballot in person. Nor does the statute impose such a burden on voters. And doing so would cut against the stated purpose of expanding, rather than limiting, voting rights.
The majority of the justices concluded the RNC didn’t “demonstrate standing under a resource-diversion theory:”
The RNC asserts that it currently expends significant resources on election monitoring. but it would need to expend additional resources to specifically monitor mail ballots received without postmarks. But the RNC already monitors elections. Accordingly, any additional resources it would expend would merely constitute “continuing ongoing activities” or “business as usual.” See Friends of the Earth v. Sanderson Farms, Inc., 992 F.3d 939, 942 (9th Cir. 2021) (holding that a diversion-of-resources injury cannot be established based on:`continuing ongoing activities” or expenditures related to “business as usual”). Nor did the RNC allege the challenged action directly affects the RNC’s core business activity. Food & Drug Administration v. All. for Hippocratic Med., 602 U.S. 367, 395 (2024) (emphasizing that challenged governmental actions must “directly affect[ ] and interfere []” with a plaintiffs “core business activities” to establish a diversion-of-resources injury). Thus, the RNC lacks standing under a diversion-of-resources theory.
The justices also decided the RNC did not prove it would succeed on merits.
The court chose to go with the State and Vet Voice Foundation interpretation of the law NRS 293.269921(2):
The second interpretation, offered by the State and Vet Voice Foundation, is that subsection 2 applies to mail ballots without a postmark because in those circumstances, “the date” also “cannot be determined.” Notably, in Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Cegayske, the federal district court interpreted a previous, identical provision, concluding that it established “a presumption that a ballot was cast in time, as long as it is received by election officials before 5 p.m. on the third day after the election, even if it lacks a postmark.” 488 F. Supp. 3d at 996 (emphasis added). And while our dissenting colleague notes that the Legislature could have clearly stated that it intended for subsection 2 to apply to mail ballots without postmarks, the converse is also true—if the Legislature meant for subsection 2 to apply only to “illegible” or smudged” postmarks, it could have explicitly said that as well. Because the statute could therefore reasonably be interpreted in at least two ways, we look beyond the statute’s plain language to determine the Legislature’s intent. See Valenti, 131 Nev. at 879, 362 P.3d at 85 (providing that to resolve an ambiguity, this court will look at the legislative history to interpret the statute in a way that conforms with reason and public policy).
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There’s your steal
Likely to be removed to Federal CT. The 5th Circuit has ruled the opposite in a Mississippi Case; ballots gotta arrive by/on election day to be counted. Sets up a split and more likely for SCOTUS to rule though this close…Maybe not.
IANAL, but because this is a decision by the NV Supreme Court, the Court of original jurisdiction is now SCOTUS. So, what’s unknown is if SCOTUS will grant cert (particularly in light of the existing Circuit Court decision you highlight), and if so, will they issue some kind of temporary injunction before next week (because obviously the case can’t be heard on the merits in 6-days)?
Nevada law explicitly allows ballots to arrive up to three days after the election, so no court can rule that they have to arrive by election day. Nobody’s even arguing for such a ruling, because the law explicitly says otherwise.
The Mississippi case would have been about Mississippi law, which presumably provides otherwise.
The issue here is that the Nevada law says ballots arriving after the election have to be accepted, even if the postmarked date is illegible. The RNC’s argument was that that’s all very well, but if it has no postmark at all then the date isn’t merely illegible, it’s nonexistent. Whereas the state argued that a nonexistent date is by definition illegible, so the clause still applies.
The underlying issue the state raised is that if someone puts his ballot in the letter box, and the post office fails to stamp it, as happens in a significant number of cases, how is that the voter’s fault? The RNC said well, they can go to the post office in person and watch to make sure it’s stamped, but the state said this is an unreasonable burden to put on voters, especially those who are unable to go to the post office during opening hours, or at all. What are they supposed to do?
And as you point out whenever it benefits Democrats … Federal law trumps state……It’s an Election DAY not week as per Constitutional statutes…. But democrats can’t win unless they cheat so twist those laws Outhouse..,
As usual you are full of crap. Federal law always trumps state law.
There is no federal law involved here.
Nothing in the constitution or in any statute requires an election to be held on one day.
You are a liar and an ignoramus and have no business slinging insults at other people.
Its also a federal election.
“What are they supposed to do?”
Elect people who will attend to making voting easy, but also secure. What they have now is an open invitation to fraud, and reasonable efforts to prevent fraud are also “common sense.” (Arguably, election workers have a fiduciary duty to prevent fraud, even when the fraud appears to comport with the law. Indeed, fraudulent activity is often cloaked in legality, because that’s how it’s made less easily detectable.) Where the law doesn’t adhere to common sense, there’s something wrong the law and faulty with the legislators who wrote and passed it.
Because in the presence of existing fraud, it’s so easy to elect such people.
As happens in a significant number of cases? I’ve got a stack of mail next to my desk from the last week and every single piece is postmarked. It’s actually really rare that a piece of mail skips that step since every piece of mail runs through a computer bar code machine. Mail that doesn’t run through the machine isn’t sorted to the proper post office and must be keyed in by hand. This isn’t the old days where dozens of people touched each piece of mail.
Yes, it happens in a significant number of cases, as has been proven in many court cases and as all the courts have acknowledged.
Mill house you are full of IT when it comes to the number of un-postmarked ballots. The lack of postmarks is rare. I can understand if postmarked but the date is unreadable as it is within Nevada law. But, when tens of thousands of “mail-in” ballots appear next Wednesday through Friday in Nevada without postmarks it is clearly fraud.
The prevalence of unpostmarked ballots is already an established judicial fact. No one is disputing it. The evidence for it has already been litigated years ago and accepted by the courts.
You have no idea that “tens of thousands” of such ballots will show up in Nevada after the election. You have no way to know that . What are you going to say when it doesn’t happen?
Milhouse,
The key is that election day is the nexus and cut off under both. In Nevada the statute allows arrival 3 days after if and ONLY if the ballot has a postmark by election day. The Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the statute must not be enforced with the nexus of election day postmark on mailed ballots.
What are they supposed to do? Stop whining for one. Early voting in Nevada began on 19 Oct. Ballets got mailed out 20 days prior. That’s gonna give about 2 weeks for the voter to get to the Post Office. If they can’t get it mailed on time then the same thing will happen to them as to every other person…they are SOL (Shit out of Luck). Don’t get your electric bill paid on time, car note, mortgage or deadline by a CT for a filing and see what happens.
You are correct, but there is more to it.
The Nevada Constitution makes it an explicit and undeniable right for a validly cast ballot to be counted. A ballot in the mail before the end of Election Day is considered validly cast. The burden of proof is not on the voter to prove that their cast vote was validly cast if it was received within the statutory limit.
The legislature put a reasonable time limit for these ballots to be received and ballots received by then are presumed to have been cast by the end of Election Day. These ballots are of the prepaid/presorted variety, though the number of ballots received. Only 24 ballots from June are known to have been received after the primary election date without postmarks.
People may not like it, but that’s the law as it stands and the state Supreme Court is bound by the state Constitution and the statutory law.
Also, the RNC and state GOP have have a long losing streak when it comes to lawsuits in Nevada, being so incompetent they are making it difficult for people who are actually doing the hard work of cleaning up the voter rolls legally and within the statutory bounds of the law due to the presumption of B.S. stemming from those RNC/NVGOP challenges.
A week before election day, that’s a real tight schedule
Yes and no. Not for an injuction telling Nevada to follow State Law and not set aside/make changes to election statutes while election is underway. To brief, argue and rule …. Very tight probably not gonna happen.
GOP operatives need to stop being dumb. Out stuff the stuffers.
Ugly. But like men competing in women’s sports, the rule keepers have abdicated or have been bought by the other side. Until you burn it down, the cheaters have the upper hand.
But don’t you just know that the millions of R voters in Nevada who are disenfranchised by this lunatic ruling won’t ‘have standing’ to do anything about it after the election is stolen (again).
Then they won’t have standing because it’s too late
Nobody is disenfranchised by this ruling.
Just those whose votes are neutralized by the fraudulent votes they end up counting.
The right to have one’s vote counted that the votes are presumed to be valid. More ballots being counted does not disenfranchise the voter, legally, since its protecting their own right, explicitly stated in strong terms in the state Constitution, to have their own vote counted.
The problem is that the system does make it easy to cheat and not get caught. There is an initiative measure on the Nevada ballot that will require Voter ID for elections if passed both this year and in ’26. I helped get that on the ballot and it is being sponsored, not by the incompetents at the RNC or state GOP, but by the Governor and other competent people outside of the official GOP apparatus.
Mail-in Ballots are presumptively fraud.
Mail-In Ballots without a postmark are confirmed fraud.
Mail-in Ballots without a postmark after the election is treason.
Mail-in Ballots (which include ballots dropped off at physical polling locations) are valid votes and the state Constitution ranks a person’s right to have their vote counted in near absolute terms.
Mail-in Ballots validly cast can come in without a post mark due the USPS. The ruling says that the USPS failing to apply a post mark can not invalidate that vote which must be counted since there is no proof it isn’t.
If Mail-in Ballots are treason, then you support prosecuting the voters, including Republicans, whose ballots were received late but within statutory bounds because the USPS didn’t apply a post mark?
This is what the statute says:
“2. If a mail ballot is received by mail not later than 5 p.m. on the third day following the election and the date of the postmark cannot be determined, the mail ballot shall be deemed to have been postmarked on or before the day of the election.”
Contrary to the meshuga court, the statute clearly requires that a purported mail ballot have a postmark. From a rational point of view, if a bunch of “mail” ballots are delivered, how are the poll workers supposed to determine that the ballots actually went through the regular Post Office system, as opposed to having been merely smuggled in?
It doesn’t clearly require that. It can be reasonably read both ways. It presumes there is a postmark, but doesn’t explicitly require one; if there is no postmark then clearly the date on it can’t be determined, which is what the statute says.
Because they’ve been delivered by the post office?
“…and the date of the postmark cannot be determined…”
What part of this do you not understand? The law doesn’t say anything about ballots without postmarks. Ballots that have allegedly been delivered by mail without postmarks are de facto fraudulent until proven otherwise. The law clearly references an extant postmark, and defines the type of postmark in question as one for which the date “cannot be determined.” In other words, the statutes reference illegible postmarks, not non-existent postmarks. Obviously, no determination of the date of a mailing can be made from a mailing with no postmark. There is nothing there to examine.
That’s just it. The law doesn’t explicitly say anything about ballots without postmarks. It doesn’t explicitly say they should be counted but it doesn’t say they shouldn’t either. What it does say is that if the date can’t be determined it should be deemed to have been postmarked before the election. Does that include cases where the date of the postmark can’t be determined, because it doesn’t exist? It can reasonably be read both ways. There is no clear answer in the text.
If the date of the postmark cannot be determined, at least there was a postmark to look at.
How does that help? If it’s delivered by the post office then we know it was in the postal system, with or without a postmark. So what additional information does an illegible postmark give us?
That it was individually processed by the postal system, as opposed to a box of 10K ballots dropped off to a postal employee to be shipped ahead, in return for some payment.
Running the whole batch through the postmarker doesn’t make them individually processed either.
It shows that at least those ballots went through the mail processing system, so they have a much better chance of at least being legitimate. A ballot without a postmark has NOT gone through that system and should be rejected out of hand. The law mentions post marks. As much as I don’t like accepting ballot without illegible postmarks, accepting them without simply leaves the entire system open to endless fraud.
“How does that help? If it’s delivered by the post office then we know it was in the postal system, with or without a postmark. ”
But we don’t know WHEN.
If it’s not postmarked that means it’s probably the Dems favorite kind of ballot– fraudulent.
It means it could have gotten placed in the system AFTER the legal limit (and likely was).
Because all the rulings that allow for such, that say that non postmarked mail getting through is significant enough to warrant such allowances were make by judges for whom fraudulent voting is a goof thing.
In fact, very little manages to avoid a postmark
Lawyer talk. Unpostmarked ballots should be dumped. We saw this scam in 2020 and obviously they are going to try it again.
I know that it is early, but I’m calling Nevada for Kamala. Confidence level is approximately 100%.
LOL. LMAO even.
The GOP in Nevada is crushing the Early Vote.
This isn’t because of anything the RNC or the NVGOP did. It isn’t even because of the Governor, his PAC, and allied clubs/groups who have actually done stuff proactively (e.g. cleaning up voter rolls, Voter ID initiative on the ballot, recruiting non-fringe wacko candidates, &c.).
It is because the once vaunted Harry Reid Machine isn’t surviving now that Reid is dead. The Dems couldn’t puff up their voter registration lead like they used to (in fact it’s likely less than 10K statewide lead at this point) and have clearly been unable to get in the early votes like they used to (including legit votes). Combined with Right-leaning refugees from California, Nevada is returning to what it was before Reid started building his machine after a narrow win in ’98.
I have no idea why half the country thinks the fix for Kamalaladingdong is in.
Decades of observing the Communist cheating
Remind me why we have an “election day”?
It’s supposed to represent a cutoff where no further ballots are accepted. The communists wish to get rid of even that now, apparently.
So disgusting
I don’t know how Trump wins
Drop off 500,000 Trump only ballots on Nov. 7th.
Sure, two can play this game
They would happily prosecute that election fraud. They don’t want it working against them
And you’ll be caught and go to prison and they’ll crow and say “see, all the fraud is on your side”, when in fact as we all know it’s merely most of the detected fraud that’s on our side because they’re much better at fraud than we are, have much more experience at it, so their fraud goes undetected. Republican fraud tends to be amateur and easily caught; Democrat fraud is much greater but they know how not to get caught.
Not sure why this was downvoted. He’s right about this.
Because so far he’s advocated non postmarked ballots, voter fraud and Democrat cheating.
Don’t be fooled by it’s use of ‘we’. Milhouse has probably already voted for Kamala several dozen times.
postmark
signatures
proof of citizenship
criminal behavior
and on and on it goes when we allow the left to be in control
If they can digitize ballots, the envelopes, too.
Sad how the right to vote is trivilaized and does not include the effect of bad votes that cancel good votes. Those voters do not matter.
Legally in Nevada, the right to have a valid vote counted is so great and near absolute that it is considered better for illegal votes to be included than a legal vote denied. Similar logic with the presumption of innocence in criminal trials and that it is better for a guilty person to go free than a innocent man be convicted.
You may not like it, but that’s the law and judges should never toss aside laws or the state Constitution that binds them because they think those laws are unwise.
I agree mail in ballots – especially ones that can be mailed AFTER you know how many you need to manufacture for a win in a close race – is basically leaving your house unlocked to take it easy on burglars.
This could be mitigated by cleaning up voter rolls, purging dups and folks who have moved or would be zombie voters, but for some reason (guess) Dems oppose each and every such effort. Which is why occassionally you get voting districts with more voters than actual breathing adult residents.
However there is one special case you’all are missing in this thread, military voters posted in hardship posts overseas. They get to vote too, and because they aren’t always able to access civilian postal systems, they get free mail back to the states WITHOUT postmarks.
Now this particular voting block historically votes more (R) than (D), a fact the Dems and Al “every vote must be counted” Gore knew full well back during the Gore v Bush debacle when they instructed their Florida certification watchers to toss every non-postmarked mail-in ballot – including the ones that arrived before the Election Day, on the premise that physically arriving before Election Day was not legal proof it was mailed before Election Day.
Forgive me if I think the party capable of THAT is capable of other bald-faced voting shenanigans.
No, you don’t. There has never been such a district. You sometimes get districts with more people on the roll than eligible residents (though it’s rare), but never ones with more actual voters. Even where there is fraud they’re careful not to be that blatant about it.
You’re being obtuse. Deliberately?
There are AWAYS more people on the roll than will actually vote.
Even in an election as overheated as the current one, you.will never get 100% participation.
However, it’s risky to fake vote a real living eligible person, they might vote for real, and then you get a provably duo vote. What you want is a database of imaginary/ineligible/or dead people to avoid that embarrassment. Hence the consistent (D) opposition to clean voting rolls and voter ID.
BTW, what other reason than enabling voter fraud is it racist to require ID to vote but NOT racist to require it for ever other financial or transactional aspect of modern life, to include things like walking into a courtroom or boarding a plane?
The more sloppy trimming of the rolls is, the easier it is to zombie vote yourself to reelection.
I guess you have never heard of Fulton county GA.
Outside of Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, there has been no district with more voters than adult residents…
“However there is one special case you’all are missing in this thread, military voters posted in hardship posts overseas. They get to vote too, and because they aren’t always able to access civilian postal systems, they get free mail back to the states WITHOUT postmarks.”
Are you sure about the lack of a postmark, BobM?
See,
https://www.stampcommunity.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=10448
Military ballots should already be handled in a timely manner by the services.
Well, I was in the army back in the 80s. Larger overseas bases back then would have their own full sized commissary, theatre, post office, etc., etc.. I was posted in smaller commands, my last overseas one (in the 80s) was Field Station Berlin. We mailed back to the states by dropping off letters to our company clerk. No postage was required, and we were definitely warned to mail any ballots early in case the home state required a dated postmark, as they were not going to get one.
At the time of Gore v. Bush I was told that was still true. If they’ve fixed that, good on them. But 100% of over seas postings never got franking to my knowledge, I was told it was the smaller commands, usually listed as hardship posts and no accompanying dependents. That was us. And it was a hardship if you were married. Single, maybe not so much. My command was all non combat MOSs, linguists, office type jobs, and accompanying support MOSs – so high percentage of female troops. And hookups. It was murder on marriages and fidelity to same. We had a running joke about fertility drugs in the drinking water because so many of the ladies got preggers, married or not.
Side note, most Field Stations started as temporary listening (ie comm intel) posts during the Cold War. They lived and worked in tents and temp buildings like Quonset huts. After a few decades of Cold War the ones that remained had permanent barracks and offices just like everyone else -,but retained the designation. So they remained small separate commands and as already technically “in the field” doing their job didn’t have to go camping on maneuvers like combat units.
FSB barracks took up part of the Andrews compound, a former SS possession. Some of the buildings dated back to that.
Military and Overseas voters ate a distinct category separate from ‘mail in ballots’. Firstly those military and overseas ballots are required to go out to voters a minimum of 45 days prior. Even in remote small combat operating bases in the sandbox I got ballots in ’04, in ’06 and ’10 in plenty of time to return them. When the returned ballots hit the US (often in NY) they go through the normal postal.system and are.supposed to get a postmark just like other mailed items, troops don’t have a blanket Franking privilege.
Military ballots, along with a few other special cases, are counted separately from other mail ballots.
“Nevada’s Effective Absentee System for Elections, or EASE, is an online application that seamlessly integrates voter registration and electronic ballot delivery and marking. EASE is available to active duty members of the United States Armed Forces, their spouses and dependents, Nevada voters who are outside of the country, Nevada residents with a disability and tribal voters who live on a colony or reservation in Nevada.”
https://www.nvsos.gov/sos/elections/voters/uniformed-overseas-citizens/ease-overview
The numbers for EASE ballots are reported and handled separately from the regular mail ballots that everyone is automatically sent (unless they take the pains to specifically opt out, as I have).
A more reasonable decision would be any mail-in ballot received after election day without a postmark would not be counted but any mail-in ballot received before election day would be. This would make a dent in the manufacture of bogus ballots designed to overcome any deficit by the Dems. Also, we can say right now that 99% of any non-postmarked ballot received after election day will be for Harris.
Sadly, as exhibited by Justice Millhouse, we don’t live in a reasonable world any longer.
Read my prior on this, overseas deployed military would lose their right to vote.
Read my reply to your earlier comment.
The court doesn’t want to make a dent in the cheating, they are in on it.
The way I understand it from 2020, the Constitution puts elections on state legislative and Totalitarian Judges have no say on the matter. They don’t make the rules.
Just have election month, maybe 2 and count the votes under every rug, car trunk or package crate gfrom China until the Marxists win.
Stop this nonsense. Make voting day a national holiday and in person voting with a picture ID only. End of story.
Its not even that D! Its one day every 4 years and if adults can sort their lives out for that one day every 4 years then maybe those people shouldn’t be allowed out on their own, without bike helmets on? 😉
But your suggestion is a good compromise that Democrats would proclaim is rwaaaaaacist because its a day ending in Y!
The strategy for the RNC should to find voters in hospitals, nursing homes, senior centers, etc. and encourage any Republicans they find to mail in their ballots.
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