By james art • Questions: When will the Nevada votes be counted and when will the results be known?
• Short answers: Mail ballots are currently being counted. They started counting at 8 am on October 21.
Ballots cast in person on a machine during early voting — Oct. 19 through Nov. 1 — cannot be counted until at least 8 a.m. on Election Day, Nov. 5.
As for when the initial results will first begin to be published, a reasonable guess is 20:00 on November 5th, more or less half an hour.
When does Nevada allow vote counting?
Election offices can begin “processing” mailed ballots as soon as they begin receiving them.
But the earliest they could start counting was 15 days before Election Day, according to state law, or Oct. 21 of this year.
Processing that could be performed included scanning the barcode on the return envelope to update the voter’s voting history, reviewing the signature on the return envelope to ensure it matches the one on file for that voter, and , if necessary, conducting the correction process of contacting the voter to verify that the ballot is indeed his if there is a problem with the signature.
Washoe County Registrar of Voters spokesman George Guthrie said signature verification letters have already been mailed.
Although mail-in ballots are already counted, machine ballots cast in person are not counted until at least 8 a.m. on Election Day.
When will the 2024 Nevada election results be known?
Polling stations close at 7:00 p.m. on November 5. Anyone who lines up by 7 p.m. will be eligible to vote. Counting the results before the last votes of the voters is a crime.
So the votes cannot be counted before 7pm on November 5th this year in Nevada.
Depending on how long the last line at the polling center is, it can take up to 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. before the last voter casts a ballot. If there is a winter storm, the signal that the last voter has finished was sometimes not transmitted until 9pm or later in previous elections.
However, with so many people now participating in early voting or using ballots to vote by mail in Nevada – almost 80% in 2022 – the lines are much shorter than they were before COVID-19.
In other words, initial unofficial results may be released earlier than in previous years.
County election officials are instructed to send their tabulation of early votes to the Secretary of State’s office — via secure file transfer protocol — no later than 6:00 p.m. on Election Day. This will allow the state to prepare and upload the results as soon as it receives notification that the last vote has ended.
That’s certainly the hope of Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who said he’s making it a priority to report Nevada’s vote totals as soon as possible.
“I think Nevadans deserve the opportunity to know what the results are on election night, and that’s my goal,” he said.
The first casting of general votes is likely to settle many races, especially if early voting includes about 90 percent of all votes cast in Nevada, as seems possible this year.
However, close races can still change in the days after November 5.
Votes cast on Election Day will still need to be processed and counted, as will votes that need to be adjusted along with mail-in votes sent by Election Day but received after.
However, the winner of most candidate races and ballot questions will likely be clear on the night of November 5. County commissioners will certify election results on November 15. Then the winners will be official, pending lawsuits.
When will the results of the Trump-Harris presidential election be known?
As for the big question of when we’ll know whether Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris has won the White House, it will depend on how close the votes are in swing states — including Nevada.
In 2020, the result was announced four days after Election Day for Joe Biden, when the Pennsylvania result was confirmed. Biden received about 34,000 more votes than Trump in Nevada, giving him a 2.39 percent advantage in the Silver State.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton conceded the next morning to Trump. However, she won Nevada by about 27,000 more votes, a 2.42% advantage.
Mark Robison is the state political reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal, occasionally dabbling in other topics. Email comments to [email protected] or comment on Mark’s Greater Reno Facebook page.