PILF fought to ensure that commercial addresses where no one lives will not receive mail ballots in the 2024 presidential election.  

(Las Vegas, NV) – August 23, 2024: In response to the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s (PILF) lawsuit, Lorena Portillo—the Clark County Registrar of Voters—investigated commercial addresses on the county’s voter roll.

Since before the 2020 election, PILF has been notifying Nevada election officials about commercial addresses on the voter roll. Follow-up investigations by the Foundation in 2024 revealed hundreds of questionable addresses remain on the state’s voter roll. Highlights of some of these commercial addresses in Clark County include strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. Below is a picture of one of the registered addresses. More pictures of the addresses flagged by the Foundation for election officials are in the petition.

The Foundation visited some of these addresses with a camera crew looking for these voters. Watch the full film below.

The Foundation asked Clark County Registrar Portillo to look at these addresses. After she refused, the Foundation filed a petition for mandamus to force Clark County to investigate commercial addresses on the voter roll. Under Nevada law, individuals are required to register to vote where they live. Additionally, state law requires election officials to perform voter list maintenance to ensure the voter roll is accurate.

Now that Registrar Portillo has done what the Foundation requested, the Foundation has agreed to dismiss its lawsuit. 

“Because of PILF’s lawsuit, Clark County was forced to investigate crazy addresses listed as residences on the voter roll including strip clubs, casinos, and gas stations,” said PILF President, J. Christian Adams. “Without this litigation, mail ballots would have gone to improper addresses. If Nevada is going to continue to run its elections by automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter, it needs to do a better job at identifying improper voter registrations.”

Nevada’s policy of automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter makes it essential that election officials have accurate voter rolls and are not mailing ballots to addresses where no one lives.

According to data from the Nevada Secretary of State, in the 2022 Midterms, 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or “bad” addresses. To put this figure into perspective, the 2022 Senate race was decided by less than 8,000 votes.

The Foundation has another ongoing lawsuit about commercial addresses that need to be investigated in Washoe County.

The Petitioners in the lawsuit against Clark County included Nevada voters, Frederick Kraus and Joey Paulos.

The attorneys for PILF in both cases are Kaylan Phillips and Joseph Nixon.

Case filings and documents in Frederick Kraus, Joey Paulos, and Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Lorena S. Portillo, in her official capacity as Clark County Registrar of Voters can be found here. A factsheet on the case is available here.

Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity. The Foundation exists to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections. Drawing on numerous experts in the field, PILF seeks to protect the right to vote and preserve the Constitutional framework of American elections. PILF has brought lawsuits and won victories in Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and across the United States.

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For media inquiries, please reach out to Lbowman@publicinterestlegal.org