Nevada will have to wait for election results

On By Karl

LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — A common complaint: We want Election Day, not election week, election month or even election season.

It is held by people who long for the days when we learned the election results not a week or more later, but on the evening of the election. But it turns out delayed results are more normal than you think. With the proliferation of postal voting, They will probably stay here.

Yet, long before mail voting and in the days of paper voting, election results were not immediately known In the presidential election years of 1960 (when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon), 1968 (when Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey), 1976 (when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford), 2000 (failed Florida vote for George W. . when Bush delayed the defeat of Al Gore), 2004 (when Bush spurned John Kerry), and 2016 (when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton).

Fact-checking organization PolitiFact explored the issue in a recent article and detected delays are more common than most people think.

The investigation found that the delays were not due to fraud or election rigging, but to a combination of factors such as when state law allows ballots to be counted and deadlines for mail-in ballots.

In Nevada, for example, county election officials can begin counting mail ballots 15 days before the general election, which falls on Oct. 21 this year.

But the law also says that mail ballots postmarked on Election Day can be received by the county up to four days later and still be counted. (Nevada Supreme Court recently passed a law This says that mail-in ballots received without any postmark or an unreadable postmark can be counted if they are received within three days of Election Day.)

I think we’re moving in a different direction where the popularity and love of mail-in ballots poses some trade-offs. With this voting method growing in popularity, election officials need more time.

But allegations of a stolen election or fraud persist on social media, fueled in part by elected officials like former President Donald Trump. without evidence He said the 2020 election was fraudulent.

But now even Trump has changed his tune, encouraging voters to vote however they can, whether by early voting, by mail or on Election Day.

The numbers show Republicans in Nevada are listening.

As of Friday morning, nearly 45,000 more Republicans had voted in Nevada than Democrats; This is unusual. While Democrats still maintain a lead in mail-in voting, more than 142,000 Republicans voted by mail. And the GOP dwarfs Democrats by a 92,000-vote margin in early in-person voting.

Sanders said confidence in the election dropped sharply after Trump’s election-denying rhetoric, but the group’s fact-checking would be necessary even if Trump was never elected.

There was a time there when people knew who the winner was (on Election Day), but that wasn’t always the case. That’s like saying it’s un-American to not have a winner before midnight, and I think our history shows that that’s not the case.

“And certainly as our election systems become more complex, as vote-by-mail becomes more popular, in battleground states where these margins are so small and you have all this time to receive the ballots, count them, curate them, it’s an understandable symptom of the process that lawmakers have decided their states should have.” Only.”

Channel 13’s 2024 Voter Guide has answers to questions you might have as you head to the polls, including where to find a polling place in your neighborhood and a breakdown of seven questions you’ll face on the 2024 ballot.