When will the 2024 ballots be counted?

• To ask: When will votes be counted in Nevada and when will the results be known?

• Short answers: Mail-in ballots are now being counted. Counting started at 8 a.m. on October 21.

Ballots cast in person at a machine during early voting — Oct. 19 through Nov. 1 — cannot be counted until at least 8 a.m. on Election Day, Nov. 5.

As for when the first results will be published for the first time, a justified prediction is 8 p.m. on November 5, half an hour long.

When will Nevada allow votes to be counted?

Election offices could start “processing” mail-in ballots once they started receiving them.

But the earliest they could start counting was 15 days before Election Day, under state law, or Oct. 21 this year.

The processing that could be performed included scanning the barcode on the return envelope to update the voter’s voting history, checking the signature on the return envelope to ensure it matches the signature on file of that voter’s state and, if necessary, performing the recovery process to contact the voter to verify that the ballot was really theirs if there was a signature problem.

Washoe County Registrar of Voters spokesman George Guthrie said signature verification letters are already being sent.

While mail-in ballots are already being counted, machine-cast ballots won’t be counted until 8 a.m. on Election Day.

When will Nevada’s 2024 election results be known?

The polls close on November 5 at 7 p.m. Anyone in line at 7 p.m. can vote. Reporting results before the final round of voting is a crime.

So votes cannot be reported in Nevada until 7:00 PM on November 5 this year.

Depending on how long the last line is at a voting center, it could take until 7:30 or 8:00 PM for the last voter to cast their vote. If there is a winter storm, the signal that the last voter made in previous elections is sometimes not communicated until 9 p.m. or later.

However, with so many people in Nevada now voting early or using mail-in ballots — nearly 80% in 2022 — the lines are much shorter than before COVID-19.

In other words, the first unofficial results could be published earlier than in previous years.

County election officials have been instructed to send their early vote tabulations to the Secretary of State’s Office by 6 p.m. on Election Day – via a secure file transfer protocol. This allows the state to prepare and upload results as soon as it receives notification that the last voter is ready.

That is certainly the hope of Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who says so he is making it a priority that Nevada’s vote totals be reported as quickly as possible.

“I think Nevadans deserve the opportunity to know the outcome on election night and that is my goal,” he said.

The initial dump of vote totals will likely settle many races, especially if early voting includes about 90% of all votes cast in Nevada, as seems possible this year.

That said, close races could still change in the days after November 5.

Votes cast on Election Day still need to be processed and counted, as do votes that need to be cured, along with votes sent before Election Day but received afterward.

Still, the winner of most candidate races and voting questions will likely be clear on the night of November 5. The district commissioners will announce the election results on November 15. The winners will then be officially announced, pending any lawsuits.

When will the presidential election results between Trump and Harris be known?

As for the big question of when we’ll know whether Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris has won the White House, that will depend on how close the votes are in swing states — including Nevada.

In 2020, the result was announced four days after Election Day for Joe Biden when Pennsylvania’s result was confirmed. Biden received about 34,000 more votes than Trump in Nevada, giving him a 2.39% lead in the Silver State.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton conceded to Trump the next morning. However, she won Nevada by about 27,000 more votes, a 2.42% lead.

Mark Robison is the state politics reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal, with occasional forays into other topics. Email comments to [email protected] or respond to Mark’s Greater Reno Facebook Page.