Nevada Voter Fears Misuse as Douglas County Mail Ballots Go Missing

"I feel it's unacceptable that we don't have our ballots," a voter in Gardnerville, Nevada, said in a voicemail that KTVN 2 News aired in a report ahead of Election Day. "I went in and voted in person at the Douglas County Rec Center. And I just don't know if my ballot's going to be misused."

We found no report that anyone has misused a ballot. Douglas County's clerk says signature checks would stop it. But nobody has said publicly where the missing ballots went, and the county is still trying to find out.

The voting booths pictured above come from KTVN's report and date from June. They do not show voting on Nov. 3.

Douglas County mailed 41,515 ballots in early October through the Reno Post Office, The Record-Courier reported. KTVN gives the date as Oct. 5. Clerk-Treasurer Amy Burgans told The Record-Courier that the Reno facility is the last place the county can confirm the ballots were.

Calls followed. By mid-October, Burgans said, her office was getting about 15 a day from people whose ballot had not come. KTVN reports hundreds of calls in the weeks after the mailing, and it puts the number of affected voters at "potentially hundreds."

The firmest figure is smaller. More than 150 ballots were replaced before the Oct. 20 deadline. Burgans told The Record-Courier that this likely does not count everyone who contacted her office. She also said the county saw no trend in who was affected: it was happening across the county and across parties.

That is what the caller was asking. According to KTVN, Burgans said safeguards such as signature verification would prevent someone else from voting with a voter's ballot, and the county is not concerned about fraud.

What the county is concerned about, KTVN reports, is that the ballots never arrived. The county has been in contact with the Nevada Secretary of State's office and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto's office, and it is investigating where the ballots went. We found no reported outcome as of Nov. 3.

KTVN reports that Douglas County voters who vote in person will be asked whether they received a mail ballot, so that the county can list everyone affected.

A Douglas County voter whose mail ballot never came can still vote in person, KTVN reports. Burgans told The Record-Courier that some callers had thought they could not vote at the polls. On Nov. 3, Nevada polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time, and anyone in line at closing can still vote.

Mail ballots must be postmarked on or before Nov. 3 and received by 5 p.m. on Nov. 7 to count. Nevada's MyBallot system shows the status of a ballot.

This is the second time this year that mail ballots have gone astray in this part of Nevada, though the first case ran in the other direction: completed ballots on their way back to election offices.

On July 6, weeks after the June primary, the Secretary of State's office received an envelope from the Postal Service's Mail Recovery Center. It held 32 completed ballots meant for the Lyon County clerk. Two more, meant for Douglas County, arrived on July 15. Sens. Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen wrote that they had been sent on time and correctly addressed, but had been marked undeliverable.

The 32 Lyon County ballots were not counted, The Nevada Independent reported, and officials said they would not have changed any result. "This failure is on USPS," Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said. The Postal Service told The Nevada Independent it was working with election officials to prevent a repeat. The senators asked for a formal investigation.

We found no official linking June's ballots to October's, and no result from that investigation.

Up the road in Washoe County, which includes Reno, the trouble is different: a printing mistake on envelopes. No official has linked it to the missing Douglas County ballots.

About 32,000 mail ballot return envelopes carried the word FALSE, News 4 reported. The Registrar of Voters said they were in the first production batch and were not limited to any party. The word printed in a field that should have been blank for voters who do not need to give extra ID. The error was "promptly identified and corrected in subsequent batches," the Registrar said. KTVN reports more than 300,000 ballots in all.

The Registrar said the error did not affect registration records, ID requirements, whether a ballot is valid or anyone's ability to vote. The envelopes were not reprinted. KTVN, citing the Registrar's office, reports that no provisional ballots were sent this election, so no Washoe voter needed the extra ID.

The vendor, hired through the Secretary of State's office, has not been named. "Nevadans deserve better," Aguilar said of the envelopes, adding that his office is evaluating its options. Former Gov. Brian Sandoval, who visited the Registrar's office, told News 4: "Once it was detected, the public was informed." He said he expects no negative effect.

We don't know where the Douglas County ballots went, or how many never arrived. We found no explanation from the Postal Service for October's ballots. We don't know whether any voter who wanted to vote will be unable to.

We will update this article when the county or the Postal Service says what happened.