Control of US senate on the line as voting continues
WITH control of the US Senate on the line, Nevada’s protracted ballot count ground through a fourth day as election officials tallied thousands of votes ahead of a Saturday deadline to accept finally arriving postal votes.
Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was running barely 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.
Mr Laxalt, meanwhile, has steadily predicted he will 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.
Mr Gloria’s office posted tabulations on Friday evening for more than 27,000 ballots that put Ms Cortez Masto within a few hundred votes of Mr Laxalt, with an estimated 23,000 more votes in heavily Democratic Clark County yet to be tallied.
With the Senate evenly divided, Nevada is one of two undetermined races that will determine which party controls the chamber, after Democratic Senator Mark Kelly won his bid for re-election in Arizona late on Friday.
If Democrats win Nevada, they will have control even before a December run-off in Georgia between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, with vice-President Kamala Harris able to break a tie. If Republicans win Nevada, control of the Senate will be decided in Georgia.
In another key race, Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak lost his re-election bid to his Republican challenger, sheriff Joe Lombardo, on Friday night.
Nevada’s count has taken several days partly because of the postal 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 tomorrow to “cure”, or fix clerical problems with, their postal ballots, enabling those to be added into the final tally.
Mr Gloria said there are 9,600 ballots in the “cure” stage in Clark County, home to threequarters 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