Clark County, NV, Election Administration Issue

In this blog, I summarize a thread I posted on social media for enhanced readability [1].

Under federal law (the UOCAVA and MOVE Acts), Military and overseas voters ("UOCAVA voters") have special rules that apply to them. In particular, they can have their absentee ballots transmitted to them online rather than postal mail, which can be unreliable in many countries. Unfortunately, postal mail can also be unreliable stateside when local election officials forget to use the right stamp. I think it is likely that Clark County, NV, sent ballots to all UOCAVA voters who requested postal (rather than electronic) transmission using domestic stamps.

The Clark County clerk publishes a status list of absentee ballot requests in Clark County, NV, at the following link: https://elections.clarkcountynv.gov/VoterRequests/EVMB/mbreq22G.zip. I decided to take a look at the file as I encountered several voters who had trouble getting their ballot from this county.

This text file contains 345910 data lines and one header line:

$ wc -l MBREQ22G.txt

Of these, 5351 are marked as corresponding to UOCAVA voters:

$ sed '/Federal Post Card/!d' MBREQ22G.txt >> FPCAclark.txt
$ wc -l FPCAclark.txt

We can see how many of these voters' ballots were marked as "UND," which the header file describes as follows:

If the RETURN_CODE field has a value of "UND", it is because the post office has returned the ballot envelope as undeliverable; otherwise this field should be blank.

We can write a Python pandas script to treat read this text file as a database, and filter nonempty RETURN_CODE columns, or formulate a complicated regular expression, but no need: nobody has the text "Federal Post Card" in the middle of their mailing address or '"UND"' (with quotes) in middle of their name. These basic nix commands do the trick.

It seems that 1064 ballots were lost in the mail on their way to UOCAVA voters and were returned by the post office:

$ sed '/"UND"/!d' FPCAclark.txt >> FPCAclark_und.txt
$ cat FPCAclark_und.txt | wc -l

Is this a typical rate of being marked "UND"? Not at all. In the entire absentee ballot database of 345910 ballot requests, only 1275 were marked "UND."

$ sed '/"UND"/!d' MBREQ22G.txt | wc -l

In other words, 83% of all undeliverable ballots came from the subset of just 1.5% of voters (those whose REQUEST_METHOD is "Federal Post Card."

Given that typically a majority of UOCAVA voters ask for ballots to be transmitted electronically, this raises serious questions about the mailroom or data-entry practices at the Clark County, NV, elections office. Either over 1000 voters were sent ballots with the wrong stamp, or they were erroneously marked as such.

The Clark County clerk ought to try to get to the bottom of this by looking into every ballot that was marked "UND." Were any of the mailing addresses among the 17% of these requests overseas addresses? (Sometimes UOCAVA voters send in a regular absentee ballot request instead of a Federal Post Card Application.)

[1] The choice was between the blue-and-white social media platform that looks like a hospital bill, and the blue-and-white social media platform whose erratic, bigoted owner is causing advertisers and content moderators to flee, neither of which promotes readability.