Votes are still being counted here in Washoe County. The registrar of voters’ office gave an update Friday on how many votes are still waiting to be processed.
The county says they've been working really hard, and as of this morning, there were about 7,000 mail ballots still needing to be processed.
But they say the "Don't Wait Washoe" campaign worked because they had fewer ballots come in on Election Day than they expected.
Bethany Drysdale, the Communications Manager for Washoe County, said, "In the primary, we had about 20,000 ballots arrive on Election Day. We also had about half the voter turnout of this election, so if you do the math, we were worried that we could get up to 40-50,000 ballots and we didn't. We got about 15,000 ballots on Election Day, so we think people heard the message, and they did get their ballot in early."
They say a hundred mail ballots are currently undergoing signature verification, and the remaining of the seven thousand mail ballots are undergoing sorting, extraction, and scanning.
They couldn't start processing those votes until all of the voting centers in the state closed on election night.
"This year, actually, this election, we had vote centers closing pretty quickly. Our last vote center closed about 9:30 p.m., so we were able to count those ballots as they're coming in and tabulate the results. So it does take a little while, though. Some of it depends on when ballots are dropped off. So we really asked voters to please get your mail ballot in early,” said Drysdale.
Voters who registered the same day were given a provisional ballot.
These types of ballots need another form of identification, and the deadline to do so was 5 p.m. Friday.
Drysdale told us, "We are looking at just processing everything and getting everything counted. Some of those tight races, I know a lot of people are watching, but what we're doing is just making sure that all the ballots are processed."
The registrar of voters has one more week to get all ballots processed and results finalized, but they hope to finish up this weekend.
