LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — A Las Vegas voter who has been receiving election mail for his home's previous owner for nearly 30 years says he's frustrated by the county's failure to fix the problem.
But a county official says the elections department needs official notice that a voter doesn't live at a particular address before it can start the process of removing that person's name from the voter rolls.
Russell Lorenzen purchased his home in 1997, and has been receiving election mail such as fliers and sample ballots for the home's previous owner ever since.
He says he just tossed the mail until 2020, when the state Legislature authorized sending mail-in ballots to every active registered voter in Nevada.
He contacted Channel 13 in March, after seeing Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar's frequent boast that Nevada runs some of the most secure, transparent and accessible elections in the country.
"I've seen him [Aguilar] on TV. Hell, on your network, plenty of times saying 'oh, our elections are secure, we don't need voter ID," Lorenzen told a Channel 13 reporter in an interview on Tuesday. "This blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're perfect. Well, you're not. And it's insulting to me, and I think probably other people, too, if they watch this interview they're going to say, 'Well, if it could happen to Russ, it could happen to me, and then it cancels out my vote."
Officials, including Aguilar, have said that even if someone has another person's mail-in ballot, they can't use it to cast a vote, because elections workers match a signature on the ballot envelope with the one on file with the county's election office. Ballots with mismatched or missing signatures are set aside until a voter verifies that he or she actually cast the ballot. If not, they are not counted.
WATCH | Las Vegas homeowner keeps getting mail for his home's former owner
Lorenzen says he filled out a form to alert the county that his home's former owner had long ago moved away. A Channel 13 reporter also brought his concerns to elections officials during a May tour of the county's elections headquarters.
But last week, Lorenzen received his sample ballot, along with one for his home's former owner. A Channel 13 reporter asked him for his reaction when he saw it.
"I can't say the word on television," he said. "But let's just say nonsense. I mean, even after showing it you guys and putting it on TV, it's like they don't care."
A county spokeswoman, however, told Channel 13 that the county had not received any written notice from Lorenzen about his home's former owner having moved.
The spokeswoman explained that once the county gets a written notice that a voter no longer lives at an address, it places that person on a list of inactive voters, and if that voter fails to vote in two federal elections, they are purged from the voting list.
(There are currently 416,618 inactive voters in Nevada, and more than 2 million active registered voters.)
But the woman who sold Lorenzen his home hasn't voted from his address for at least 14 general elections, and yet still appears to be on the voting rolls.
The county's spokeswoman said, however, that as long as no election mail is returned to the county by the post office as undeliverable — or the county gets mail back marked "return to sender" by a new resident at the address in question — an absent voter can remain on the rolls.
That's why officials not only encourage voters to keep their address current in state files, but also to return any official election mail to the county with a notation that it has been delivered in error.
Any voter can check their registration status online at vote.nv.gov.
Lorenzen says he was initally taken aback when asked to fill out a voter residency discrepancy form, asking why it was his responsibility to fix an error that the county had made.
"So none of this should be happening, right?" he said. "That's exactly what they told me when I contacted them, saying it was my responsibility to contact them and say, 'oh, she doesn't live here anymore,' which they sent me the form for that."
It's not clear why the county didn't receive the form that Lorenzen said he sent back.
And although he prefers to vote in person, he's prepared to receive his official mail-in ballot, along with one for his home's previous owner.
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