LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — It's a common complaint: We want Election Day, not election week, election month or even election season.
It's made by people who long for the days when we knew election results on the evening of the election, not a week or more later. But it turns out, delayed results are more normal than you might think. With the prevalence of mail-in voting, they're probably here to stay.
Still, long before mail-in voting — and in the days of paper ballots — election results weren't immediately known in the presidential election years of 1960 (when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon), 1968 (when Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey), 1976 (when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford), 2000 (when the botched Florida vote delayed George W. Bush's defeat of Al Gore), 2004 (when Bush turned away John Kerry) and 2016 (when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton).
The fact-checking organization, PolitiFact, looked into the issue in a recent article and found delays are more common than most people think.
The investigation found delays were not the result of fraud or election cheating, but a combination of factors including when state law allows ballots to be counted and deadlines for mail-in ballots.
In Nevada, for example, county elections officials can start counting mail ballots 15 days before a general election, which this year fell on Oct. 21.
But the law also says that mail ballots postmarked on Election Day can be received by the county up to four days later and still counted. (The Nevada Supreme Court recently upheld a law that says mail ballots received without any postmark — or an illegible postmark — can be counted if they're received within three days of Election Day.)
I think that we're just moving into a different direction where the popularity and love of mail-in ballots has some trade offs. And so with the growing popularity of that method of voting, election officials need more time.
But the allegations of stolen elections or cheating persist on social media, fueled in part by elected officials such as former President Donald Trump, who has maintained without evidence that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Now, however, even Trump has changed his tune, encouraging voters to cast ballots in any way they can, either in early voting, by mail or on Election Day.
The numbers show that Republicans in Nevada are listening.
Nearly 45,000 more Republicans than Democrats had voted as of Friday morning in Nevada, which is unusual. While Democrats still maintain the lead in mail voting, more than 142,000 Republicans have voted by mail. And the GOP is swamping Democrats when it comes to in-person early voting, with a 92,000-vote lead.
Sanders said that while confidence in elections came into sharp relief after Trump's election-denying rhetoric, the group's fact check would have been necessary even if Trump had never been elected.
There was a period in there where people did know who the winner was [on Election Day] but it wasn't always the case. It's kind of like suggesting it's un-American to not have a winner before midnight, and I think our history shows that's not the case.
"And certainly as our election systems have grown more complex, as mail-in voting has become more popular, in battleground states where these margins are very small, and you have this amount of time to receive ballots, count them, cure them, it's just an understandable symptom of the process that lawmakers have decided their states should have."
Channel 13's 2024 Voter Guide has answers to questions you may have as you head to the polls — including where to find a polling place in your neighborhood and a breakdown of the seven questions you'll encounter on your 2024 ballot.
