Nevada Secretary of State aims for faster reporting of election results

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar speaks to the press at the Clark County Election Department after the polls close in Nevada on election night, Tuesday Nov. 5, 2024. Photo by Christopher DeVargas

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar is committed to working with Gov. Joe Lombardo and the Nevada Legislature to produce quicker election results, he told the Sun last week.

Lombardo, the Republican governor, in his State of the State address on Jan. 15 said, “It makes zero sense to keep counting ballots four days after an election.”

He continued, “We can be proud that Nevada is one of the easiest places to cast a vote, but it’s time we make sure the votes are in and counted by Election Day.”

Nevada law permits mail ballots to be received four days after polls close if they are postmarked by Election Day. Voters also have a week after Election Day to “cure” their mail ballot signatures — 23,644 ballots were cured in the November election.

Mail ballots arriving after the election account for a paltry “1% of the total ballots cast in the election” and aren’t the cause for delay in posting results, the Democrat Aguilar said.

The problem lies with ballots collected at election centers on Election Day, Aguilar said. His office has been working to build processes to handle the capacity.

“It’s time for us to look at the backhouse and say, ‘How do we modernize building efficiencies and transparency into the backhouse process?’” Aguilar said.

He said his office and Clark County election officials have been speaking every week since the election to discuss how to develop more efficient vote-processing infrastructure. Most of the state’s voting population is in Clark County.

“We are waiting on Clark County to help me come up with that solution,” Aguilar said. “I think I have a solution in my head, but I also want the person that’s going to be responsible for executing that solution to have skin in the game and to come up with that solution, because they are the experts in this.”

Aguilar sees getting the ballots received on Election Day processed that same day as part of the fix.

As he and Clark County election officials continue working on solutions, he said another part that plays into successful elections is ensuring election clerks have sufficient resources. Aguilar said election officials had experienced staff turnover from “increasingly complex requirements.”

“We have to make sure we are understanding the needs of our human capital and at the same time, understanding the needs of machines and space,” Aguilar said. “We know space is tight in Clark and Washoe (counties) — we need to ensure that they are getting the space requirements they need to be able to manage and run the elections we need them to run.”

Lombardo said he hoped the path to speedier election results would be decided by the Legislature. But if the Legislature — with Democrats holding the voting majority in both the Senate and Assembly — doesn’t get anything passed, Lombardo said he would propose a ballot measure for voters to decide.

“I hope that this is one of the first bipartisan bills I sign,” said Lombardo, who will be up for reelection in 2026.

Nevada Democrats and their associated groups, including the Progressive Alliance of Nevada, were critical of the ask saying that “Governor Lombardo wants to win reelection by taking away voting days.”

Aguilar said he wanted to improve transparency for data available.

That would include people seeing how many ballots are in possession of their county, how many are in the verification or tabulation process and how many are completed and counted. He pointed to the United States Postal Service’s available data on ballots in its possession and said making that information accessible could show people what was still in progress.

“It’s my responsibility to understand what people want to accomplish,” Aguilar said, “and then providing that solution to them so we can all agree this is where we want to go as a state.”