Of Mail-In Voting Glitches, A Marked Ballot for a Dead Grandma, Bankruptcies and Closures

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Feb 22, 2024

It’s been a busy week in Reno from another notable bankruptcy, a closure in downtown, the end of the overnights for our last 24-hour local pharmacy and an election story that went slightly under the radar but which will undoubtedly keep biting back.

If it wasn’t confusing enough, with the GOP holding a caucus but also having a None of the Above primary, and the Democrats going with just the primary, readers and locals on social media started alarmingly posting that their mail-in ballots had been marked as received even though they had not voted in the process.

One reader said a dead person, a bogeyman of elections, had also been marked as having mail-in voted, in this case his grandmother who passed away in 2019. The posts were seen but getting few likes, with people fearing that might mean they would be categorized as wild eyed conspiracy theorists.

Lo and behold, eventually the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office issued a statement saying a software glitch caused unmailed Nevada ballots to initially show up as counted.

“The legacy systems used by a number of the counties require additional steps be taken to ensure that voters who did not return their ballot do not have vote history; some of those steps were not taken, which resulted in inaccurate data. Our office has been validating new files from each county and moving them into production as soon as the accuracy of the data is verified,” the Secretary of State’s office wrote.

Nothing about still sending ballots to dead people though was included. The reader indicates his late grandmother for whom he was a caregiver has been receiving ballots for several election cycles now, despite the fact he submitted her death certificate twice through the avenues Washoe County set up to avoid this.

Following the 2020 presidential election, when the vote counting was extremely slow, Nevada officials said 10 dead voters had ballots cast in their names, a minute, but still worrisome detail.

The glitch and still not getting all dead people off voter rolls will be fodder in the months ahead, especially after results are announced in this extremely contentious, volatile election year in Washoe County, one of the few competitive purple areas in the entire nation.

In terms of local bankruptcies, after the Career College of Northern Nevada derailed students and staff with its own abrupt filing earlier this month, this week the Reno City Center filed a not so surprising bankruptcy petition, leaving in doubt the conversion of the fenced off, rotting former Harrah’s hotel-casino, now a gaping eye sore in the middle of downtown. Just across the street, Wolf Putt, an indoor mini golf venue announced on Instagram it would be closing just a few months after its opening. Further down the street, Walgreens ended its overnight hours, the last local pharmacy to do so.

A reader who works at that location told us anonymously it was a management decision amid increasing disgruntlement among staff feeling overworked and complaining of a hostile work environment.