LAS VEGAS — With control of the U.S. Senate on the line, Nevada’s protracted ballot count ground through a fourth day Friday as election officials tallied thousands of votes ahead of a Saturday deadline to accept finally arriving mail-ins.
Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was running slightly behind Republican Adam Laxalt, but with the remaining tens of thousands of uncounted ballots mainly coming from the state’s urban cores, her campaign expressed optimism she could overtake her challenger. Laxalt, meanwhile, has steadily predicted he’ll stay in the lead as the count drags on.
“We are doing everything in our power to move ballots forward just as quickly as we can,” Joe Gloria, the registrar in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, said at a press conference on Friday. He said there were 50,000 ballots still to be counted.
With the Senate evenly divided, Nevada is one of three undetermined races that will determine which party controls the chamber. If either party wins the state plus the race in Arizona, it will have a majority even before a December runoff in Georgia between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. If the Arizona and Nevada seats split between parties, control of the Senate will be decided in Georgia.
Nevada’s count has taken several days partly because of the mail voting system created by the state Legislature in 2020 that requires counties to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day if they arrive up to four days later. Even after the counts are finished this weekend, voters have until the end of the day Monday to “cure” — or fix clerical problems with — their mail ballots, enabling those to be added into the final tally. There are 9,600 ballots in the “cure” stage in Clark County, home to three-quarters of the state’s population.
Nevada, a closely divided swing state, is one of the most racially diverse in the nation, a working class state whose residents have been especially hard hit by inflation and other economic turmoil
Roughly three-fourths of Nevada voters said the country is headed in the wrong direction, and about 5 in 10 called the economy the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of 2,100 of the state’s voters.
Voters viewed the economy negatively, with VoteCast finding nearly 8 in 10 saying economic conditions are either not so good or poor. Only about 2 in 10 called the economy excellent or good. And about a third of voters said their families are falling behind financially.
But that didn’t necessarily translate into anger at President Joe Biden or his party. About half considered inflation the most important issue facing the U.S., but they were evenly split over whether they think higher prices are due to Biden’s policies or factors outside his control.