There’s no reason Nevada has to be one of the slowest states in the nation when it comes to tabulating the results of a critical election.
Thankfully, Nevada’s prolonged timeline for counting votes didn’t really matter this year — primarily because we, as a state, didn’t end up mattering much either.
Due to Vice President Kamala Harris dramatically underperforming expectations last Tuesday, we knew the national outcome of the 2024 presidential election before our little corner of the American West had a chance to dominate too many headlines. Even locally, thanks to Donald Trump’s relatively strong performance in Nevada, most media outlets were able to divine the state’s results long before election officials were ready to stamp their seal of approval on any final number.
Other races — such as that for the U.S. Senate — took a bit longer to determine. Predictably, that wait led conspiracy theorists to postulate (oddly) that “the fix was in” against Republican Sam Brown. Why, exactly, such peddlers of panic believe a cabal of cheaters would meddle only with his race while ignoring the presidency is a bit of a mystery — but there’s little sense in trying to understand the reasoning behind such absurdity.
Nonetheless, even while discounting the howls of online trolls and purveyors of election fraud myths, there’s something inherently wrong about an election process that takes days on end to announce official results. If for no other reason, the sheer embarrassment of being (one of) the last states in the nation to sift through ballots ought to be enough to motivate state lawmakers to reassess our election procedures.
To be fair, much of the criticism we receive in Nevada is borne from an ignorance of how we are legally required to count votes in this state.
Mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive up to four days late are required to still be counted, and ballots arriving with no postmark or an unclear postmark are counted up to three days after the election — meaning votes are bound to continue trickling in long after polling places close their doors.
Understandably, that steady stream of late ballots makes it impossible to announce the winner in races that are determined by razor-thin margins until several days have passed.
Not only does such a delay provide plenty of ammunition for unsavory characters to sow doubt about election results, but it also acts as a chokepoint for determining what the balance of power is going to look like on the national level. Since most Americans aren’t intimately familiar with Nevada’s election process, much of the nation sees such a delay and wonders why the sparsely populated state of Nevada is so incapable of counting ballots in a reasonable amount of time.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Mail-in ballots, early voting and other laws designed to ensure widespread voter access don’t have to handicap our ability to deliver quick results in important electoral contests. Florida, for example, was one of the first states to embrace the widespread use of mail-in ballots, and yet it is often among the first states in the union to announce official results on election night — which is a far cry from where things were in 2000 when the nation agonized for weeks about Florida’s hanging chads and supposedly inadvertent votes for Pat Buchanan.
A part of what allows Florida to rapidly provide the nation with accurate election results is the simple fact that, unlike Nevada, ballots in Florida have to be received by election officials on or before Election Day rather than merely postmarked by then. That hard deadline for receiving ballots eliminates the potential for a slew of late ballots to alter close races.
Of course, such a policy is not without its trade offs. Ensuring ballots get into the hands of election officials on time would require educating voters that trusting the United States Postal Service to make timely deliveries might not be the best course of action just days before an election.
Delivering that education to voters, however, wouldn’t be an impossible task. Political parties would have it in their own interest to make sure voters were adequately informed — and the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office could even include language on the ballots themselves to make the nature of the deadline perfectly clear.
Apparently, for Democratic leadership in Nevada’s Legislature, such trade offs weren’t even worth considering last year. During the 2023 legislative session, Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo introduced a reform package that, among other things, included changing the deadline for counting ballots.
Concerned that such reforms would restrict access to the ballot box, it’s understandable Democrats didn’t rush to support it. However, they didn’t even offer the bill a hearing to identify an amicable compromise — and, as such, they missed a massive opportunity to implement some bipartisan improvements to our election system.
For example, the increased use of mail-in voting has produced a growing problem with election officials needing to “cure” ballots — a sticky situation that the voter ID amendment voters just overwhelmingly supported would be perfectly positioned to help alleviate.
As The Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy noted in a recent report on election reforms, identification numbers are far easier than handwritten signatures for election officials to verify — meaning there would be fewer ballots rejected or in need of “curing” if states allowed ID numbers to begin replacing signatures. Such a policy would not only protect voters from having their ballots discarded merely because of messy handwriting, but it would also improve reporting times as curing ballots can be a time-consuming part of the election process.
In other words, even with expanded mail-in ballots, early voting and other critical voter-access laws on the books, there are plenty of reforms available to ensure the state can quickly deliver accurate results after major elections.
Considering our usual importance as a political bellwether, adopting such reforms should be considered mandatory if we hope to be taken more seriously than Florida was 24 years ago.
Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.
