Three days after Election Day, 70K mail ballots in Nevada's urban counties yet to be counted

LAS VEGAS — If the pressure to count votes faster and release results is getting to Joe Gloria, he's not showing it.

With dozens of cameras rolling Thursday morning, local and national reporters pressed Gloria, the registrar of voters in Clark County, about the pace at which his office was tallying the ballots.

"The elephant in the room I keep trying to communicate is that there are statutory deadlines here that prevent me from finishing any earlier than the general public or you, the media, would like to see," Gloria said at the news conference two days after Election Day in Nevada, a crucial swing state that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate after all the votes are tallied.

With Senate races already called in other key states — like Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Hampshire — the nation's eyes have zeroed in on Nevada, where more than 70,000 mail ballots had yet to be counted and reported Friday afternoon.

"Why would I rush through carelessly to process these ballots when I know, due to the statutory deadlines," Gloria said, "I can't move any faster?"

What's happening in Clark County

The county where Gloria administers elections is home to Las Vegas and 1.3 million of Nevada's 1.8 million active registered voters.

State law requires him — and other county election officials across Nevada — to keep counting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day through this Saturday. State law also prevents him from counting provisional ballots cast on voting machines, totaling 5,555 in Clark County, until state election officials provide their provisional report next week. And state law dictates he must spend the week after an election "curing" ballot errors, such as mismatched signatures.

In Clark County alone, more than 50,000 mail ballots still needed to be tallied Friday.

And that figure doesn't include the pending provisional ballots, ballots that will arrive by mail Saturday morning or the 9,659 ballots that still needed to be "cured."

Gloria said he expects to release additional results Friday night — an update that will knock off at least 15,900 ballots from the pending count.

He said his team collected about 56,900 ballots total on Election Day from drop boxes across the county. Not all of those ballots had been counted as of Friday morning. And in addition to those ballots, about 12,700 arrived Wednesday by mail, 626 on Thursday morning and 104 ballots on Friday.

Barring any major equipment failures, Gloria said Friday, he predicted the majority of pending mail ballots to be counted Saturday after he receives the final arriving ballots, meaning a "very large" update in Clark County results should be released sometime Saturday evening.

What's happening in Washoe County

In Washoe County, which is home to Reno, about 20,000 ballots were still in the balance Friday afternoon, after the county finished counting over 18,000 ballots Thursday, according to the most recent data available online on the county's official elections website.

Washoe, the second most populous jurisdiction in Nevada, is the state's notorious swing county.

According to the data reported by Washoe, the county received about 103,550 mail ballots during the early voting period and on Election Day.

County election officials had worked through a little over 79,200 of those ballots as of Thursday, records show.

But with Nevada's main population centers still chipping away at the remaining ballots this weekend, final unofficial results are still about a week away. ahead of the state-imposed canvass deadline of Friday, Nov. 18.

Rio Lacanlale is the Las Vegas correspondent for the Reno Gazette Journal and the USA Today Network. Contact her at rlacanlale@gannett.com or on Twitter @riolacanlale. Support local journalism by subscribing to the RGJ today.