STEVE SEBELIUS: Election delays not corruption, but counting

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably taken a break from obsessively hitting “refresh” like a potential Powerball winner waiting for the delayed results of Monday’s drawing.

At least with the Powerball, you could entertain dreams of fabulous vacations and spacious mansions. Hitting refresh on the Nevada secretary of state’s website only conjures dreams of boring Senate hearings and late-night legislative maneuverings.

But this is the election we have chosen, a system where we don’t learn the results on election night, or several nights thereafter, where tallies change as mail ballots are counted and where Election Day becomes Election Week.

It’s frustrating for everybody, not least the candidates who in some close races won’t know if they’re heading for a swearing-in or just for swearing. And it’s frustrating for voters, although they can at least return to the safe confines of newly political-ad-free TV and phones unclogged with political texts.

The first thing that must be said: The slow pace of tabulating mail ballots is not evidence of corruption, it’s evidence of counting.

Under the law, mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received by Saturday will be counted. That means ultra-close races (and there are some on the ballot) could change. A candidate leading today could be trailing tomorrow.

So when random internet trolls throw shade on the process, keep in mind the system is working the way we’ve set it up to work.

For example, some guy calling himself “realDonaldTrump” wrote on some platform called “Truth Social” that: “Clark County, Nevada, has a corrupt voting system (be careful Adam!), as do many places in our soon to be Third World Country.”

The county released a lengthy reply, summed thus: “You don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy. Get a clue.”

While fears about corruption and foul play are unfounded — and it’s very important that we not make public policy based on people’s superstitions — there are policies that undergird mail voting that we could re-examine.

Mail balloting was never A Thing in Nevada until 2020, when state lawmakers meeting in a socially distanced special session passed new rules for elections, in which every single active registered voter was to be sent a mail-in ballot. The idea was to keep voting from turning into a superspreader event.

In 2021, the Legislature made the rules permanent.

But the law was written to say you could wait until literally the last minute to send in your ballot. If it’s postmarked by Election Day and received by Saturday, it counts. That means we can’t give what they call a “final, unofficial” vote count until all those ballots have been received, signatures checked and counted.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way: The state could, if lawmakers wanted to, impose an earlier deadline for mail ballots, say a week before Election Day. That would give counties time to receive, process and count those ballots and allow us to know the results of all the votes — early, Election Day and mail — on the night of the election.

Certainly, we in the journalism trade would like that. Nobody wants to write, let alone read, a story that says races were “too close to call” for several days on end. Readers want results — and want them now.

Nevada has a well-earned reputation for making voting easier. We’ve got two full weeks of early voting. We’ve got voting centers where anybody can cast a ballot, regardless of where they live. We’ve got automatic voter registration at the DMV. And now, we’ve got mail-in voting.

There are those who lament the ease of voting, who think casting a ballot should for some reason require a certain degree of sacrifice or suffering. But that’s nonsense; we should pursue policies that encourage every eligible voter to cast a ballot and make doing so as easy as possible.

Still, there’s nothing disenfranchising about setting an earlier deadline for postmarking mail ballots, just like there’s nothing disenfranchising about having only two weeks of early voting, rather than three or four.

If voters prefer a single election night of frantically hitting refresh — rather than a week of staring at screens that change once a day — that can be done, presuming lawmakers agree that impatience in learning results is a suitable reason for change.

But if they do, it would be choice based on policy, not because Nevada is a corrupt, Third World dictatorship. Elections there are marred by cheating. Nevada’s delays are for the opposite reason: counting.

Contact Steve Sebelius at SSebelius@reviewjournal.com. Follow @SteveSebelius on Twitter.