NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nevada — The top elections official in Clark County on Friday revealed the number of mail-in and provisional votes left to be counted in the presidential race, correcting an earlier misstatement that overstated the figure by as much as 20,000 votes.
Joe Gloria, Clark County’s registrar of voters, attributed the mistake to some ballots being multiple pages long and that the number of pages, not ballots, had been reported. Joe Biden held a 22,000-vote statewide lead over President Trump as of Friday, according to Gloria.
Below are the figures Gloria gave on Friday for the number of ballots that remained to be counted:
Mail-in ballots remaining: 54,600
Gloria expects the remainder of this category to be counted and reported by the end of the day on Sunday.
Provisional ballots remaining: 60,000
Not all of these ballots will be counted since each one needs to be verified, but Gloria could not provide an estimate as to how many that will be.
ID required: 44,000 as of Thursday
These ballots need voters to show identification for one of many possible reasons before it can be counted — for instance, inactive registered voters who were automatically sent a mail-in ballot but whose registration was not able to be matched with a motor vehicle or Social Security record.
“Cure” ballots: 2,100 as of Thursday
These are ballots where the signature on a mail-in ballot did not include a signature or did not match the one on file for the voter, but voters can still correct, or “cure,” the problem by contacting the election office.
Additionally, 241 ballots arrived via U.S. mail on Friday, and more may arrive before the Tuesday deadline.
Nevada’s slow ballot processing has peeved residents, election observers, and anxious voters across the county, but elections officials say that the time is necessary.
“Our priority here is to make sure that we’re accurate in what we’re doing. So, we’re not interested in moving as fast as we can,” Gloria said.
He declined to answer what hours those processing ballots are working, saying that the question could be answered later by a member of his staff. But he said that about 300 people are involved with the effort.
The Trump campaign and Republicans filed a lawsuit and forwarded a complaint to the Department of Justice on Thursday, alleging that Gloria failed to maintain the county’s voter list sufficiently, resulting in 3,000 voters who had changed their address to move out of Nevada voting in this year’s general election.
Gloria said that his office will look through that list of individuals but offered a possible explanation, at least a partial one.
“You don’t have to live here in order to be eligible to vote here,” Gloria said. “This is a military town. We have Nellis Air Force Base, we also have several students that travel outside of the state to go to school. Those folks are eligible to vote here in Nevada.”
“It’s not out of the ordinary at all for somebody not to live here but be eligible to vote here, so we will look at that, and we’ll review it,” Gloria said.
