Election Day is over and some races have been decided. Many others could be delayed for a few days while the high volume of paper ballots are processed. Ballots are still arriving in the mail and those take a lot longer to count than in-person votes.
"It does take some time," Jamie Rodriguez, Government Affairs Manager for Washoe County said. "I think an important thing to note for mail ballots is there's a multitude of steps of verifications, making sure we have them all, they're accounted for."
The Washoe County Registrar of Voters Office is tasked with the multi-step process of counting the mail ballots. It is processing more than 10,000 ballots from election night.
"Going through 10,000 ballots, looking at 10,000 different signatures just takes time, so we'll do them in small batches, have kind of every step going at the same time," Rodriguez said.
6,000 more ballots arrived in the mail, Wednesday, and many more are expected to arrive in the next few days. State law requires the ballots to be accepted up to four days after the election as long as they are postmarked by election day.
"Having no idea what that volume is going to be for the next few days, I would heavily encourage people to understand that it's going to take a few days if not more than that for us to really know the final results," Rodriguez said.
The 2021 legislature passed a law that makes mail ballots universal. More than two-thirds of people who voted before Election Day did so on paper ballots. Those take a lot longer to process. That can be frustrating for people because the in-person system typically had final results by the end of election night.
"I do appreciate the frustration for candidates, for the public of this," Rodriguez said. "Unfortunately, the laws are what the laws are and we do still have those four days to receive ballots."
Counties have an additional two days to cure signatures after the Saturday deadline for mail ballot arrivals. The lengthy process may seem like a step backwards in Nevada for efficiency and technology.
"It's not so much going backwards," Rodriguez said. "It's all the steps that we want to do to make sure that we're processing actual ballots and ballots for voters who cast those."
Seven other states have universal mail ballots and some of them have their results much sooner than Nevada. Rodriguez says it is hard to compare our state with others because the election laws vary.
"I do know a lot of mail-in states, they're able to start counting a lot sooner than we are. We're not allowed to start counting ballots, the actual count of the votes until polls close," Rodriguez said.
Counties are continuously updated the election results. They will not be official until the canvass of the vote, June 24.
