LAS VEGAS (AP) — Election certification rallies Friday in Nevada’s two most populous counties were rocked by voting conspiracies, as local officials in the state’s rural counties quietly certified 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 later this month for final approval by Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar and the Nevada Supreme Court. Losing candidates have until November 20 to request a recount.
Nevada began certifying the results on Wednesday.
Trump won Nevada, with its fifteen rural counties. Officials in those counties unanimously confirmed Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris this week during meetings where many of the clerks received praise from county officials for the conduct of the election.
But in the two counties where Harris prevailed — Clark, which includes Las Vegas, and Washoe, which includes Reno — the rallies 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 election results after more than two hours of heated public commentary, including unsubstantiated claims about insecure ballot stacks and scanners subject to internet hacking. One woman warned the commissioners that “President Trump will come for you” if they certified the vote.
Commissioner Jeanne Herman cast the only dissenting vote on Friday, but provided no explanation. Herman has consistently voted against certifying election results since 2020 and unsuccessfully tried to overhaul the county’s election processes after Trump’s loss that year by returning to paper ballots and hand-counting votes.
Andrew McDonald, Washoe’s deputy registrar of voters, told commissioners there were no clerical errors that would allow a decision against certifying the vote.
“No voters have been disenfranchised,” McDonald said. “We conducted fair, accurate, secure and transparent elections.”
At the same time, Clark County commissioners were also listening to a wide range of voting conspiracies in southern Nevada on Friday. Ultimately, the board voted unanimously to certify the election results.
The audience in Las Vegas was largely packed with people urging the board not to certify the election. Some approached the microphone with stacks of paper in their hands that they said contained evidence that the election had been rigged. They said it was not credible that Trump and Sam Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate, lost in the county despite Trump’s statewide victory.
Lorena Portillo, Clark County’s top elections official, told commissioners that while preparing for Friday’s meeting, they discovered about 1,600 ballots 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 was immediately notified and Portillo said an audit will be conducted in conjunction with state election officials.
