Nye County faces long wait for vote | Nevada | News

In Nye and Washoe counties, voter lines lasted three hours Tuesday evening, and voters in Clark County continued to cast ballots until about 9 p.m., delaying the release of election results.

“This is not surprising,” said Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, which sent more than 500 volunteers to polling stations across the state to monitor operations.

“They’re not prepared,” Haseebullah said of rural Nye County. “They don’t have enough machines to check people in and they don’t have enough workers.”

The last ballot was cast in Nye County at 9:32 p.m. The final vote was also cast in Washoe County, where there were similarly long lines Tuesday evening, a county spokeswoman said around 9:45 p.m

Jacob Smith, an attorney with the ACLU of Nevada who monitored the polling place in Pahrump, said only three voting machines were in use. Just after 7 p.m., the line was “a little shorter” but still appeared to be about two hours long, he said.

As of about 5:30 p.m., 76 percent of registered voters in Nye County had cast a ballot in this election. Nearly 1,600 people voted at the Bob Ruud Community Center, the only polling location in Pahrump.

Some locations in Washoe County also experienced long wait times Tuesday. Bethany Drysdale, a spokeswoman for Washoe County, said there was a three-hour wait at the University of Nevada, Reno when polls closed to additional voters at 7 p.m. The last ballot was submitted to UNR shortly after 9:15 p.m

As of 8:30 p.m., there were still 10 locations where voters were lined up in Washoe County. Another 45 locations in the county have been closed, Drysdale said.

Election officials had said the initial results would not be released until all voters present by 7 p.m. had had a chance to cast their ballots, regardless of how long it took. This applied to all polling locations throughout Nevada.

Nye spokesman Arnold Knightly said the delays were not due to a lack of machines, but that the long wait times were due to 145 same-day registrations in Pahrump. He confirmed the three-hour wait at polling stations.

Smith said the line at the Pahrump polling location was long throughout Tuesday evening. Less than an hour before polls closed, Smith said the line was still “pretty big” and hundreds of people were still waiting to vote.

“I think people are definitely frustrated, but they remain steadfast in their desire to vote,” Smith told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, adding that the line “shows no signs of slowing down or stopping.” have shown.

Smith is one of dozens of lawyers the ACLU dispatched Tuesday to observe the election process in Nevada. He had been at the Bob Ruud Community Center since early Tuesday morning, watching as most voters cast their votes in person rather than mail-in ballots.

In addition to only using three machines at the Pahrump location, voters could also fill out paper ballots, which Smith said seemed more time consuming.

“That was a county decision, and I think that might be why Nye County is the only one seeing these huge lines,” he said of the number of machines.

Contact Mary Hynes at [email protected] or 702-383-0336. Follow @MaryHynes1 on X. Pahrump Valley Times staff writer Jimmy Romo contributed to this report.