Nevada election results: State pauses vote counting until Thursday
A Clark County election worker scans mail ballots at the Clark County Election Department on in North Las Vegas, Nevada
(Getty)Nevada has temporarily suspended vote counting in the 2020 election, and will not resume until Thursday morning at 9am PT, which is 5pm in the UK.
The state still has all mail ballots received from Election Day onwards to count, as well as provisional ballots.
Around 70 per cent of the votes have been counted in Nevada so far with Joe Biden leading Donald Trump 49.2 per cent to 48.6 per cent, according to data from the Associated Press.
Mr Biden also currently leads Mr Trump in overall electoral college votes — the Democratic nominee has secured 238 compared to Mr Trump’s 213. A win in the southwest state would give either candidate six of these votes.
This year’s election has seen some of the slowest vote counting on record due to the massive influx of mail ballots which pollsters have to account for. In Nevada, ballots being submitted by mail must be postmarked by Tuesday 3 November and received no later than Tuesday 10 November to be considered eligible.
This means the full number of votes won by Mr Biden and Mr Trump might not be fully known until next Tuesday.
Many Americans took to Twitter to scold Nevada officials for pausing counting. One man responded to a tweet by the official Navada Elections account, saying: “Is that a typo or did you really post that there would be no more updates for 27 hours in an election of this magnitude?”
Another man said the entire US system was a “farce”. He wrote: “I haven't a clue which side this will benefit because I know nothing about Nevada. But any electoral system that counts votes which arrive up to a week after voting day is a farce.”
Is that a typo or did you really post that there would be no more updates for 27 hours in an election of this magnitude?
— trustfundbaby (@trustfundbaby) November 4, 2020
Mr Biden’s lead of 8,252 votes, as of the latest count, is not totally secure either — thousands of mail ballots still need to be counted in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, which accounts for almost three-quarters of the state’ population.
The move by Nevada comes after a last-minute, unsuccessful attempt by the Trump campaign to stop mail ballots in Clark Country from being processed using machines that automatically verify signatures. Mr Trump’s team said the process was not “transparent”, but Nevada’s Supreme Court threw the claim out on Election Day.
Nevada is an historically Democratic-voting state, which Hillary Clinton narrowly won in 2016 by less than 2 percentage points.
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