After delay, ballots to be mailed to Washoe County next week

Ballots will not be mailed to Washoe County residents this week because a vendor was unable to print them in time.

Washoe County Registrar Deanna Spikula said ballots will instead be mailed out Oct. 2 and voters should start seeing them appear in their mailboxes soon after.

Spikula said the county had pushed the printer it hired to meet an earlier deadline as officials comply with a new state law requiring ballots to automatically be mailed to all active voters, whether they request one or not. But Spikula said the printer was facing "exceptionally high demand" and the county reverted to its original schedule.

Spikula said her office has had to scramble to conform with the state's new mail-in voting law. "We had hoped to get them out sooner, as early as this week, but we will stick to our original planned delivery date of Oct. 2."

All Nevada counties are planning to have ballots in the mail headed to voters sometime over the next two weeks, with the exception of Humboldt County, which is planning to mail ballots Oct. 12.

In other election developments:

• A legislative committee approved a request from the Secretary of State to hire five temporary workers for 12 weeks to deal with an increased workload as the election approaches. Deputy Secretary of State for Operations Mark Wlaschin said the Secretary of State had already shifted six workers to its election division to help answer calls and adjust to new procedures ahead of the election. Since the legislature passed a bill to automatically send mail ballots to all active voters, fighting between Democrats and Republicans has sown confusion among the electorate and, Wlaschin said, caused the number of calls the office was receiving daily to rise from 50 to 1,500. The workers will help process the calls and address the backlog in other divisions, he said.