The courts wouldn’t end Nevada’s mail voting. The Republican secretary of state nominee would.

You probably voted by mail last month. About 60 percent of primary voters did. The ballot came directly to you thanks to the U.S. Postal Service. You filled it out at the kitchen table, and you had a few days to actually read the ballot, research candidates and issues, and make an informed decision at your own pace.

That’s how a majority of Nevadans have been voting since the state started sending ballots to all voters in 2020.

The Republican Party has spent two years trying to take that away from you. In 2024 the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign sued Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar and the election officials in Clark and Washoe, demanding the state stop counting mail ballots that arrive in the four days after Election Day, even when they’re postmarked on time. The judge dismissed the case because the plaintiffs couldn’t show they’d been harmed. No one had been. 

This week, in a case that’s extremely similar to what happened here in Nevada in 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in a Mississippi case that federal law sets when a ballot must be cast, not when it has to arrive. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, made a distinction between when a ballot is cast and when it arrives. A ballot must be cast no later than election day, which is why mail ballots must have a postmark of election day or earlier. According to the court’s decision, a ballot is considered cast when an individual votes, not when a ballot is received. 

It was never about fraud. Nevada’s system is open to Republicans exactly as much as to Democrats. Republicans simply use it less. And the people leading the crusade against it keep using it themselves. 

Trump voted by mail in a Florida special election in March, while physically in Palm Beach during early voting. Even while using Florida’s well-respected and decades-long successful vote by mail process, he demanded Congress ban the option for everyone else. So has Jim Marchant, stating that he doesn’t want “mail-in ballots at all,” and who once again this year is the Republican nominee to be the state’s top election official.

The crusade gets Nevada itself wrong, too. Mail voting here is not a blue-county luxury. Nearly nine in ten Nevadans live in Clark and Washoe counties, but in this year’s primary the four counties with the highest mail-ballot rates were rural, and rural Nevada votes red. 

A rancher outside Elko isn’t driving ninety minutes each way to cast a ballot that gets mailed to her home even without her requesting one. End mail voting in Nevada and the first voters the RNC cuts off are its own.

Nevada mails a ballot to every registered voter and keeps the polling places open if you want to vote in person. Early voting, Election Day, walk right in. Most people don’t, because the ballot is already on the counter. 

The fight here was never about giving Nevadans a choice. It’s about taking one away.

For years, the conservative legal movement preached a simple mantra: if a right isn’t explicitly written in the Constitution, judges have no business inventing restrictions. They built a philosophy—textualism—to impose that discipline on the judiciary. 

But when Justice Barrett applied that very lens to election statutes, she didn’t find the partisan leverage the GOP craved. Instead, she found a straightforward adherence to the text that upheld mail-in ballots. Republicans spent decades sharpening a weapon of judicial restraint, only to have it turn around and beat them at their own game. They lost the legal battle, but as we’re about to see, they are far from finished.

The office that runs Nevada’s elections is on this November’s ballot, and the Republican running for it is Jim Marchant. 

He won the Republican primary in June, setting up a rematch of the 2022 race Aguilar narrowly won. Marchant is among the most prominent election deniers in the country, and his platform is not subtle. He wants to end universal mail voting, count ballots by hand, force every Nevadan to re-register, and require documentary proof of citizenship to vote. Everything the courts wouldn’t hand the RNC, he is promising to do inside Nevada.

Somewhere in one of those rural counties, a Nevadan who votes Republican is going to get a ballot in the mail this fall, because the court her party built refused to take it from her. She’ll fill it out at the kitchen table, like the majority of Nevadans. 

Whether she gets one the year after that isn’t up to a judge anymore. It’s up to her, in November. Her party went to court to end mail voting and lost. Now it’s asking her to vote for the man who’ll take her right away.