Biden leads by less than 1% in Nevada – but results aren’t expected until THURSDAY because officials won’t start counting remaining ballots until midday
- Results from the state were originally expected late on election night with Joe Biden currently up 0.6%
- But officials stopped reporting results and said they would begin counting remaining ballots on Wednesday
- All in-person votes had been counted the state said but it still needs to count ballots sent in by the post – including ones which could arrive as late as next Tuesday
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Results from the western swing state of Nevada could be known on Thursday morning, after pollsters stopped counting ballots on election day and planned to return to them on Wednesday.
Nevada officials originally hoped to release results at 9.45pm Pacific time, or just after midnight on election night eastern, but they will instead be delayed until 9am on Thursday, midday eastern time and 5pm UK time.
Joe Biden is currently edging out Donald Trump by about 1 per cent, leading 588,252 votes to 580,605, having outperformed Hillary Clinton in the most populous part of the state.
Polling workers in North Las Vegas, Nevada, after the polls closed on election day yesterday
The state said it had counted all votes cast in-person either on election day or beforehand and all mail-in ballots received before election day. However it still needs to count postal votes received on 4 November, while it will also accept mail-in ballots arriving as late as next Tuesday, as long as they were posted before the polls closed.
It means the full number of votes won by Donald Trump and Joe Biden might not be fully known until next Tuesday, although close to 1.2million votes had been counted as of Wednesday morning.
Nevada’s secretary of state’s office said it was ‘difficult to estimate’ how many ballots were left to count as it sent every voter in the state a ballot in the post, even if people subsequently chose to vote in person.
Joe Biden currently has a narrow lead over Donald Trump in Nevada, with more ballots still to be counted
But while Biden has a slim lead of fewer than 8,000 votes as of the latest count, around 75,000 mail ballots could still need to be counted in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and close to three-quarters of the state’s population.
Biden is currently winning this part of the state by 422,762 votes to 362,573, and Jon Ralston, editor of The Nevada Independent, said the 337,000 previously counted absentee ballots from the county ‘have dramatically favoured the Democrats so far by more than two to one’, potentially giving the Democrat some breathing space.
Meanwhile the Trump campaign also lost a last-minute bid to try and stop mail ballots in Clark Country from being processed using machines which automatically verify signatures, after their claim that the process was opaque was thrown out by the state’s Supreme Court on election day.
Initial results in the state were also likely delayed by the fact 30 polling spots were allowed to stay open for an extra hour following a court order, after they faced ‘technical problems’. No results are allowed to be posted until all ballots have been cast in Nevada.