Clark County expects to finish ballot count Saturday

Clark County’s top election official said he expects the state’s most populous county to have nearly all of its outstanding mail ballots counted by the end of day Saturday.

“All of our mail ballots that have been received minus the cure and the provisionals will be reported today,” county Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said during a news conference Saturday morning.

The county has about 22,000 remaining mail ballots it needs to count and report, which Gloria said is a mix of mail ballots received from the United States Postal Service and mail ballots dropped off on Election Day Tuesday, which is allowed under Nevada law.

Saturday is the deadline for the county to receive all mail ballots that were postmarked by Election Day. Gloria said they received another small batch of ballots Saturday morning from the postal service of just 268 ballots, and will make another run to see if any more come in by the deadline.

“We don’t want anybody to be disenfranchised,” Gloria said.

The county has been steadily tabulating mail ballots that have arrived at the county’s election headquarters in North Las Vegas daily, working toward a Tuesday deadline to have all votes counted. The Clark County Commission is expected to hold a special meeting on Friday to certify the results of the 2022 election, following a report from Gloria.

The outcome of several close races is still undetermined, including the race for U.S. Senate between Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt.

On top of the 22,000 that will be reported today, there roughly 7,100 ballots that still need to go through the signature curing process in order to be counted, down almost 2,500 from the roughly 9,700 that needed curing as of Friday. So far, about half of the 14,651 ballots that have needed curing in Clark County have been cured, Gloria said. (“Curing” is needed if a voter’s signature on the outside of a mail ballot doesn’t match the signature on file with the county’s election department. In those cases, voters are contacted and asked to verify their identity and that they cast the ballot in question.)

The deadline to cure ballots is 5 p.m. Monday, and Gloria encouraged voters whose ballots needs curing to call the county’s hotline at 702-455-6552.

There are also an additional 5,555 provisional ballots from people who voted in-person Election Day in Clark County. Those ballots cannot be counted processed and counted until Wednesday under Nevada’s election statutes. Gloria said his staff is currently working to process those ballots to determine which are eligible to be counted. They results of those ballots is expected Wednesday evening.

While former President Donald Trump has once again taken to social media this week multiple times to make claims, without any evidence, of voter fraud, Gloria said he hasn’t heard of any campaigns making similar allegations.

“We haven’t heard anything from any campaign relating to fraud or questioning,” he said.

Gloria also said that there have been no reports of any of his staff being harassed, and he attributed that in large part to the support and presence of several police agencies at the counting location, including the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, North Las Vegas and Clark County County Park Police.

Contact Colton Lochhead at clochhead@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ColtonLochhead on Twitter.