Three days after the election and many races are still too close to call in Nevada, including the presidential contest. Joe Biden currently has a slim lead over President Trump. There are still more than 120,000 ballots left to count in Clark County. 63,000 of those are mail ballots.
"We're anticipating and hoping that with the number of ballots that we see now, that we should hopefully be ready to have a final count in the majority of mail ballots by Sunday at some time," Joe Gloria, Clark County Registrar of Voters said.
Gloria says the focus is to count the ballots accurately rather than quickly. He says the reason the process is taking so long is because his staff of more than 300 has to open the ballots, verify the signatures and records, then sort them all before they can count them.
"There's no speeding up that process," Gloria said. "As I indicated yesterday, we're going to continue to count and make sure that we're being accurate."
Those are the biggest chunk of ballots that are needed before Nevada has its winners. Washoe County is all caught up after counting more than 9,000 mail ballots that arrived on election day. It picked up 175 ballots from the post office, this morning.
"We're now at the point where whatever little comes into the mail is essentially immediately dealt with," Heather Carmen, Washoe County Assistant Registrar of Voters said.
Workers are still staying busy with other tasks, including duplicating ballots.
"We have our duplication board here, duplicating ballots that were damaged in the mail process or our citizens overseas and our military ballots that come in," Carmen said. "Those need to be duplicated in order to be tallied into our system."
Registrar's offices are also working on challenged ballots. Many of those have problems related to signatures.
"We're working on getting those challenge codes lifted and continuing on with the process so that those votes can be cast," Carmen said.
Counties cannot begin counting provisional ballots until the Secretary of State's Office gives them the green light. Those are in-person ballots that require the voter's proof of identification. Same-day voter registrants are part of that group if they did not have an I.D. on the day they voted. Clark County has 60,000 provisional ballots and Washoe County has more than 5,100.
"There's a cross check to make sure that voter that did same-day registration did not already vote in another jurisdiction," Carmen said.
Those ballots will be the last ones to be counted, starting next week. Each vote has to be counted by November 12.
Meanwhile, Gloria is addressing the Trump Campaign's claim that 10,000 people voted in Clark County, despite moving away before the election. The campaign gave Gloria a list of names and he is reviewing those. He says this type of activity is normal and it is often times, legal.
"We have Nellis Air Force Base," Gloria said. "We also have several students that travel outside of the state to go to school. Those folks are eligible to vote here in Nevada."
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