Nevada Court Sides Against GOP: Absentee Ballots Without Postmarks Get Green Light

The Nevada Supreme Court will allow state officials to count absentee ballots arriving without a postmark as many as three days after the Nov. 5 general election, rejecting a challenge brought by the Republican Party in the swing state.

The decision on Monday is a setback for the national GOP organization in Nevada, where polls show a tight race in the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

A majority of the Nevada high court found that a state law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted if the postmark date “cannot be determined” applied to envelopes with no postmark at all. Republicans had argued that the law should only cover ballots with postmarks that aren’t legible.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many ballots might be affected by the ruling; the GOP offered an example of 24 ballots received by one county during this year’s primary. But the case is part of a broader effort by Republicans to impose more restrictions on absentee voting and question the security of the process. In 2020, a larger proportion of President Joe Biden’s supporters voted by mail compared to Americans who voted for Trump, according to a Pew Research Center report.

A spokesperson for the Republican Party did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Nevada justices wrote that the RNC hadn’t offered claims or evidence that unpostmarked ballots are vulnerable to fraud or that the state lacked tools to address any concerns about their security. There also wasn’t evidence…   that unpostmarked ballots favor one political party.

‘Public Interest’

“Rejecting timely mail ballots because of postal service omissions cuts against the strong public interest in exercising the right to vote,” the majority of justices wrote in the main opinion.

The decision follows a ruling last week by a federal appeals court in a fight over Mississippi’s election practices declaring that counting late-arriving mail ballots violates federal law. But that court, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, declined to order any action ahead of Election Day, meaning Mississippi is likely to tally late-arriving ballots in the November contest.