Clark County adding paper step to voting process for ’26 midterms

Lorena Portillo, Clark County Registrar of Voters, takes a demonstration ballot printout from a printer after making her selections during a news conference on a new voting process at Clark County Election headquarters in North Las Vegas Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025. Photo by: Steve Marcus

Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

Clark County residents casting in-person votes in next year’s midterm elections will be greeted by a new step in the process.

While check-in at polling sites will remain the same, voters will now receive a printed version of their ballot after making their selections on a voting machine.

They will then carry that to another machine, which will tabulate the vote. Those paper ballots are stored for any potential audit or recount, said Lorena Portillo, the county’s registrar of voters.

The change is intended to strengthen public confidence in voting results and expedite ballot tallies, county election officials said.

“We are conducting many tests — test elections, in fact — that will also help us understand what voters will see, the behaviors, the performance of the equipment,” Portillo said before demonstrating the process during a news event Thursday. “We’re very confident that the voters will be very happy with the new process.”

President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden was “stolen” — despite numerous court rulings to the contrary — have undermined election confidence among his base.

This erosion is reflected in polling data: From 2016 to 2024, the percentage of Republicans “somewhat” or “very” confident that presidential elections will be carried out properly plummeted from 55% to 28%, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, 84% of Democratic voters expressed confidence in 2024.

The office of then-Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, spent 125 hours investigating election fraud claims from within her own party after Biden won the Nevada vote by nearly 34,000 votes. The investigation found no evidence that would have changed the election results.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, did uncover one confirmed case of voter fraud: Las Vegas resident Donald Kirk Hartle, a registered Republican, pleaded guilty to voting more than once in the 2020 election.

Separately, judges nationwide dismissed multiple lawsuits from Trump allies alleging election fraud in the 2020 election.

The department is testing “from A to Z” both when receiving the equipment and when running mock elections, Portillo said.

She added that the steps the department goes through to ensure voter confidence aren’t changing.

“We continue to have high standards and security,” Portillo said. “The paper ballot itself will be something that the voter will enjoy to have in their hand and for them to go and actually cast the ballot themselves.”

The registrar also said the new system would allow results to be delivered faster. Instead of going through each flash drive in the county’s 5,000 voting machines on Election Day, the Election Department will pick up cards from 400 to 500 tabulators.

Still, that may not matter, as Portillo noted that Nevada law prevents results from being posted until all polls close.

In the 2024 election, about 589,000 voters in Clark County cast ballots in person, either via early voting or on Election Day, according to the nonpartisan Truth Alliance. In-person voters accounted for 57% of the more than 1 million total votes cast in Clark County, the alliance reported.

“Clark County is always looking to improve and bring in new ways for voters to have a great in-person experience,” Portillo said. “It used to be a two-step process. Now, it’s a three-step process.”