Nevada officials blame Postal Service for mail ballots that arrived at wrong office

U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen are demanding the U.S. Postal Service explain how 34 Nevada mail ballots from June’s primary elections arrived at the wrong location weeks after Election Day, leading to the cancellation of those votes.

The Democrats requested a formal investigation in a Thursday letter addressed to Postmaster General David Steiner and USPS Inspector General Tammy Hull.

“To ensure these issues are corrected before the November midterm elections, we urge USPS to immediately initiate this investigation and share its results with Congress,” the letter said. “We also urge USPS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to evaluate whether an independent OIG investigation is warranted.”

The senators gave the postal service and the inspector general’s office August deadlines to brief them.

Ballots deemed undeliverable

Despite being properly addressed to the Lyon County Clerk/Treasurer’s Office, a certified mail envelope containing 32 ballots arrived at the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office on July 6, the local office said.

Likewise, two ballots intended for Douglas County’s elections office arrived at the same state office on Wednesday.

Nevada counties certified election results on June 18.

In Lyon County, two dozen ballots were mailed out of Dayton and eight came from Fernley, the county said.

Although they went through a certified count, the votes didn’t count, the county said.

Nevertheless, the votes wouldn’t have changed the outcome of any elections. In Lyon County, 12,764 ballots were cast in the election, 63 percent of which were mailed in.

The affected voters — 17 Republicans, 11 Democrats and four others — mailed their ballots well in advance of Election Day, Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said. It wasn’t clear Thursday if they’d been notified.

Additional information about the Douglas County ballots was not immediately available, although the senators’ letter said they were sent on time and with the correct address. Just over 16,600 Douglas County residents voted in that election — 76.7 percent were mail-in ballots.

Aguilar, Nevada’s chief elections officer, described the mishap as a postal service failure.

“The ballots had the correct address on them, but for some reason were flagged as undeliverable by the United States Postal Service, and delivered to our office weeks after the Primary election,” he said in a statement. “The Secretary of State’s Office immediately reached out to the USPS to alert them to the issue, get answers and resolve it so it does not recur.”

Aguilar said his office was also awaiting more information.

A postal service spokesperson said that it’s been working with election officials to figure out what happened.

“The Postal Service takes these matters very seriously, and we are working diligently to ensure this type of incident does not happen again in the future,” said USPS regional spokesperson Sherry Patterson in a statement. “We will continue to communicate with Nevada’s election officials as needed.”

The ballots were in red, white and blue envelopes with the official election mail logo, Lyon County. They were mailed from the USPS mail recovery office in Georgia.

Lyon County’s Clerk/Treasurer’s Office has been located at the same Yerington address for more than three decades, said the county, adding that it’s been documenting ongoing mail delivery issues affecting the office since 2023.

“Errors of this magnitude are incredibly rare, making USPS’s failure to deliver lawful and correctly addressed ballots even more disturbing,” the senators’ letter said. “USPS must clarify what caused these select ballots to be marked as undeliverable and why safeguards were not in place to prevent such significant mistakes.”