Nye County ballot hand-count won't make Thursday deadline
LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — Nye County's controversial hand-count of ballots from this month's election continues, but it now appears volunteers won't be able to get through all of them by Thursday's deadline.
County Clerk Mark Kampf told News 3 that as of Tuesday, they had counted about 12,000 ballots.
Another 8,000 remained, with a pace of about 2,000 counted per day since the process began Thursday last week.
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Kampf said that had he been cleared to move forward sooner, he's confident the count would have been successful.
He blamed lawsuits from the ACLU of Nevada and orders from the Nevada Secretary of State's office that prevented a count from starting until after last Tuesday's election.
Kampf claimed the results of the hand count thus far were proving accurate when compared to the machine tabulations. After the first day, Kampf admitted there was a "very high" error rate of 25%, but that has decreased each day since. He put out a call for hundreds of volunteers and any registered Nevada voter to come help complete the process.
Kampf said he asked several volunteers to leave when it appeared they made too many mistakes. As of Wednesday, a day before deadline, he said his smaller team of volunteers who had been doing it for several days were more efficient than the initial large number of people last week.
Nye County commissioners voted to run a hand-count parallel to the standard machine tabulation. Kampf previously referred to the hand-count as a "test," saying all publicly reported results will come from the machine count.
Nye County is one of the first jurisdictions nationwide to act on election conspiracies related to mistrust in voting machines, though other counties across Nevada have considered using hand-counts in the future.
