Protecting Nevadans Who Vote by Mail (RNC v. Burgess)

The Republican National Committee, Nevada Republican Party, the Trump campaign and a Nevada voter filed a lawsuit against election officials challenging a Nevada law allowing mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked on or before Election Day and are received within four days. If they are not clearly postmarked, they must be received within three days. This is known as Nevada’s “mailbox deadline.”  

The partisan actors who filed the lawsuit claim that the deadline violates a provision of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), a 2022 law that Campaign Legal Center helped pass to update the Electoral College process. CLC, with the ACLU of Nevada and Protect Democracy, filed a friend-of-the-court brief explaining that while the plaintiffs use the correct legal mechanism to enforce the ECRA, they are dead wrong on the law.  

Nevada, like all states, is permitted to facilitate vote-by-mail and ensure that voters who cast their ballot in a timely way will have their vote processed and counted. At least 20 states, red and blue, similarly count ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive some days after.  

This issue is especially important in Nevada, where the state Legislature has adopted a universal vote-by-mail system that allows all voters to vote by mail. As a result, voting by mail has become very popular in Nevada, and a growing majority now cast their ballots by mail. To avoid undermining voters who place their ballot in the mail on or before Election Day, Nevada ensures that ballots postmarked by that day are counted.  

As CLC’s brief points out, Nevada’s mailbox deadline accounts for well-known issues with U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which include postmarking and delivery times, by permitting ballots without a legible postmark to be counted if they arrive within three days of Election Day.  

Even though USPS tries to postmark all ballots, the agency has acknowledged that logistical breakdowns can prevent some ballots from receiving a postmark. And even when postmarks are applied, they can become smudged or illegible by the time they reach an election office for processing. The three-day rule also accounts for USPS’s expected ballot delivery turnaround, which might get longer if USPS’s planned changes to mail service in Nevada go into effect in 2025. 

Every vote counts in our democracy, so it is vital that we count every vote — including votes cast by mail on or before election day but arrive a few days later.