Elections officials in Nevada pleased with ‘efficient’ release of voting data

For the latest results on the presidential and U.S. senate races, check out the Sun’s 2024 Election Tracker here.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar and Clark County Registrar of Voters Lorena Portillo stressed the improvement in the state and county’s reporting time Tuesday night as officials released the first results of the 2024 election.

State law requires initial election results be withheld until the last voter has participated, which happened at 9:45 p.m. Tuesday. Ten minutes later, and the Secretary of State’s office released the first batch of voting data, comprised of over 747,000 early in-person votes and mail-in ballots received and counted to Monday.

“The fact that we’ve been able to increase that efficiency is pretty significant, and that’s the result of this expansion of this facility is pretty significant,” Aguilar said.

In 2020, the first results were published by the secretary’s office at around 3 a.m., making the earlier release of results a win for election officials, Aguilar said. Despite the improvement, Nevada was still the last state in the 2024 election to release initial results.

Both Portillo and Aguilar repeated that “no major issues” occurred at any polling places, and that all voting centers across the state opened on time.

Some Nevadans had attributed long wait times at voting locations — which at times were two hours long — to an increase in voters doing same-day registration. Over 6,900 people registered on Election Day, Portillo said, but Aguilar added the process does not significantly increase wait times.

Aguilar attributed the smooth same-day registration as well as the quicker results release to an investment in election technology and personnel, including the Voter Registration & Election Management Solution project, or VREMS.

“It’s more machines, more machines, more machines, and it’s more people, more people and more space, more space,” Aguilar said.

There are more 11,000 ballots that need to be cured, meaning signatures on their ballot did not match what was on file with election officials. Portillo and Aguilar stressed the importance of curing the ballot, especially in a battleground state with races decided by slim differences.

“We know Nevada runs some of the tightest, slimmest races in the country, and those 11,000 ballots are going to be very important to some of the races that we’re going to see in this state,” Aguilar said.