FILE - A voter deposits his voting machine activation card into a box after casting his ballot at a polling site at Henderson City Hall, Nov. 5, 2024, in Henderson, Nev. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP, File)
November 15, 2024 - 6:22 PM
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Election certification meetings on Friday in Nevada's two most populous counties were roiled by voting conspiracies while local officials in the state's rural counties quietly approved election results that favored President-elect Donald Trump.
Friday was the deadline for counties in the battleground state to finalize election results. All 17 counties met the deadline to forward election results for final approval later this month by Democratic Secretary of State of Cisco Aguilar and the Nevada Supreme Court. Losing candidates have until Nov. 20 to request a recount.
Nevada began certifying results Wednesday.
Trump won Nevada, carrying its 15 rural counties. Officials in those counties unanimously certified Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in meetings this week where many of the clerks received praise from county officials for running a smooth election.
But in the two counties where Harris prevailed — Clark, which includes Las Vegas, and Washoe, which includes Reno — meetings resembled the tumultuous certification period four years ago after Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden.
Washoe, Nevada's swing county, voted 3-1 on Friday to certify its election results after more than two hours of heated public comment that included unsubstantiated claims of unsecure piles of ballots and scanners subject to internet hacking. One woman warned commissioners that “President Trump will be coming for you” if they certified the vote.
Commissioner Jeanne Herman cast the lone dissenting vote on Friday but didn’t provide an explanation. Herman has consistently voted against certifying election results since 2020 and tried unsuccessfully after Trump's loss that year to overhaul the county's election processes with a return to paper ballots and hand-counting votes.
Andrew McDonald, Washoe's deputy registrar of voters, told commissioners that there were no clerical errors that would allow for a decision against certifying the vote.
“No voters were disenfranchised," McDonald said. "We ran a fair, accurate, secure and transparent election.”
At the same time Friday in southern Nevada, Clark County's commissioners were also listening to a wide range of voting conspiracies. In the end, the board voted unanimously to certify election results.
The audience in Las Vegas was mostly packed with people urging the board not to certify the election. Some approached the mic with stacks of paper in their hands that they said contained proof the election was rigged, saying it wasn’t believable that Trump and Sam Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate, lost in the county despite Trump’s victory statewide.
Lorena Portillo, the top election official in Clark County, told commissioners they discovered about 1,600 ballots while preparing for Friday's meeting that had been processed but not counted. The ballots have since been counted and added to the county's election results, but the additional ballots did not affect the outcome of any race, Portillo said.
The secretary of state's office was notified immediately, and Portillo said an audit will be completed alongside state election officials.
News from © The Associated Press, 2024