Counting ballots a weeklong affair

On Friday, Douglas County commissioners are scheduled to canvass the vote.

It seems a near thing, but it sounds like the ballots will all be counted and results available by that time.

Douglas County election workers spent the weekend wading through some 5,000 ballots.

By Monday morning, there were 12,634 total mailed ballots counted and we were hearing that perhaps we might see another 1,000 votes before the project’s done.

Monday was also the last day for voters to cure a ballot if something was wrong with a signature, so all ballots should be ready to go on Tuesday.

The new numbers brought Douglas County’s turnout up to 44 percent, a little closer to 2020’s turnout of 47 percent.

Even with the additional ballots, it appears Douglas is on its way to fifth place in the state.

All four of the counties ahead of us in turnout, Eureka, Lincoln, Storey and Esmeralda counties added up to a total turnout of 4,056 votes.

Esmeralda County only has 621 active voters and 103 of them turned out on Election Day, along with 37 early voters and 163 mailed ballots.

That’s on the extreme low end of the scale, but it’s pretty easy to extrapolate that despite all the hubbub, Nevada voters pretty much yawned at the prospect of voting in the primary.

Statewide 25.39 percent of voters turned out with 261,489 mailing in ballots, according to the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office on Monday morning.

It’s actually a good thing the mailed turnout wasn’t larger, because counting those ballots is labor intensive in the extreme.

If there was only a smoother method of conducting an election besides wading through paper ballots?