Nevada Supreme Court officially certifies election results

Members of the Nevada Supreme Court met Tuesday to officially certify the results of the 2018 elections.

Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske conducted the process, called the canvass.

According to the statistics, 975,980 of Nevada’s 1,564,066 registered voters cast ballots in the General Election — a 62.4 percent turnout.

According to the official results, significantly more people voted early than on Nov. 6 election day — 554,242 to 334,080. In addition, there were 83,779 absentee ballots cast and 3,879 mail in votes.

Justices asked how errors in which some people cast ballots twice are dealt with. Elections Deputy Wayne Thorley told the seven members of the high court there’s no way to determine exactly which ballots were cast twice. But he said if the errors are greater than the margin of victory, they can’t certify the results. That, he said, occurred in this year’s primary for the Clark County assessor’s race, which forced a special election to resolve who won.

Another issue, he said, occurs when someone asks for an absentee ballot but then shows up in person. He said if that person voted both times, the absentee ballot isn’t counted.

The other issue was raised by Justice Jim Hardesty who asked how the Secretary of State and DMV are dealing with the passage of Question 5 directing people be registered to vote when they appear at the Department of Motor Vehicles for licensing or other business.

Cegavske said the problem is the cost of implementation.

“We don’t really know the official impact,” she said. “The biggest obstacle is we were given no money to implement and no staff and neither was DMV.”

Thorley said the projected cost is fairly substantial, “several hundred thousand dollars.” Those costs will impact the counties that receive the voter registration cards from DMV as well as the Secretary of State’s office.