EDITORIAL: Major election problem remains unresolved

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, has been talking up election reform bills that passed during the recent legislative session. He’s missing the forest for the trees.

Mr. Aguilar is especially excited that money appropriated by the Legislature will allow Nevada’s counties to merge into one voter registration system. This should produce cleaner voter rolls and improve cybersecurity. Mr. Aguilar’s office also received funding for more voter education. That includes programs to allow his office to text voters information about the election or notify them if the signature on their mail ballot doesn’t match.

It looks like it won’t just be campaigns spamming your phone next year.

Another election-related bill requires that sample ballots be sent out before mail ballots. A fourth requires campaigns to disclose if campaign materials are AI-generated.

“Everything we tried to do this session has been focused on the voter experience and the voter perspective,” Mr. Aguilar said.

These are all reasonable, if incremental, advances. But there’s one problem. Mr. Aguilar and legislative Democrats ignored the top concern of many voters — the delays in counting ballots that are commonplace in Nevada.

In Nevada’s 2022 and 2024 U.S. Senate races, the Republican challengers were leading after election night. As mail ballots trickled in days after the polls closed, those candidates saw their leads shrink and disappear. The Associated Press didn’t declare Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto the 2022 winner until the Saturday after the election. The AP didn’t call Sen. Jacky Rosen’s 2024 race until late Friday night.

There is a logical explanation for why those two Democrats prevailed. Democrats disproportionately cast mail ballots, and they take longer to count, particularly when Nevada law allows mail-in votes — even those that are unpostmarked — to be tallied even if they arrive days after the election. Predictably, these delays in tabulation fuel conspiracy theories and undermine public confidence in the process.

The problem has an easy fix: Move cutoff dates up a few days to ensure that valid mail ballots are returned by Election Day and can be counted in an expedited fashion. This would disenfranchise no one because those who miss the deadline would still be free to vote in person. More realistic deadlines have allowed other states to deliver timely election returns and still expand mail-in voting.

A pending U.S. Supreme Court case will tackle the issue of mail ballot deadlines even if Democrats in Carson City prefer the status quo because they feel it gives them an electoral advantage. In the meantime, however, Mr. Aguilar shouldn’t be taking a victory lap on election reform when he ignored such a major concern.

The views expressed above are those of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.