The last voter in Nevada cast a ballot nearly five hours after polls closed Tuesday, a delay that Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said was unacceptable. "Nevadans deserve better, and my team is ready to support Clark County officials and officials from any county willing to take ownership and confront these issues head on," Aguilar said in a statement.
Experts and officials pointed to multiple factors for the long lines, including a new voting process used for the first time in a general election. The system requires voters to print a paper ballot, inspect it, and then feed it into a separate tabulator — a process College of Southern Nevada professor Sondra Cosgrove said took longer than expected. Cosgrove said Registrar of Voters Lorena Portillo acknowledged the new process was slowing things down.
County officials said staffing and equipment were based on past turnout, which was roughly the same as the 2022 midterm. At Brinley Middle School, a new polling site where the last voter waited, 725 people voted Tuesday compared to 785 at the nearby elementary school used in 2022. County spokeswoman Jennifer Cooper said the elections department could not add machines at some locations because additional power sources were unavailable.
Portillo told reporters election night that there was no abnormally high number of first-time voters registering same-day, who cast provisional ballots that take longer to verify. Cosgrove said she does not believe the delays affected election integrity, but warned that long lines and delayed results fuel conspiracy theories and made Nevada look "kind of silly" as other states called races.
Sources: Las Vegas Review-Journal
Original reporting: Las Vegas Review-Journal →
English (US)·