Debunked: Nevada did not stop counting ballots overnight | #TheCube

A county election worker moves boxes of counted ballots at a tabulating area at the Clark County Election Department in Las Vegas, Nevada. - Copyright AP Photo/John Locher

By Hebe Campbell & Matthew Holroyd

Published on 06/11/2020 - 07:30

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Nevada did not stop counting ballots overnight on Tuesday and Wednesday but instead stopped posting updates of the count.

Election officials in Nevada have denied false rumours that polling stations stopped counting ballots overnight for the 2020 US presidential elections.

Nevada has not yet declared a result but Joe Biden was leading Donald Trump by just one percentage point on Friday morning.

The state's six electoral college votes would be enough to send the Democrat candidate to the White House, according to projections by the Associated Press.

Nevada officials announced on Wednesday that they would not be providing election results updates until Thursday morning.

Ballots from those voting on the day in person, or by mail before November 2 had been counted.

But the announcement led to misleading claims on social media that the state had stopped counting votes on Tuesday and Wednesday evening after election day.

A post on Facebook by Trapt, a US band that has published pro-Trump content, falsely concluded that Nevada had stopped counting ballots as the tallies were even.

"Why are they not counting RIGHT NOW?!" said the post, linking to an article by the far-right Breitbart news.

While Trump has repeatedly claimed electoral fraud without evidence and called for an end to vote counting, his supporters in Nevada have demanded that polling stations count every vote.

The Trapt post was labelled as partly false information by Facebook and third-party fact-checkers PolitiFact.

The false claim was also published on Twitter by CNBC, receiving more than 1,000 likes and 900 retweets.

But in a statement, Nevada's Secretary for State denied the suggestion, saying "we did not stop counting ballots".

"The counting of ballots is ongoing and will continue until every cast ballot is counted."

"Due to the fact that we wanted to provide an accurate update today, we didn’t want to disrupt the counting that has been taking place since election night," a spokesperson added in a further statement to Euronews.

The Secretary of State also emphasised that the process of counting ballots is "labour intensive" and additional reporting requirements would reduce efficiency and accuracy.

The remaining ballots that have not been counted in Nevada include mail votes received on or after Election Day.

Under state law, mail ballots postmarked by Election day and received before 17:00 local time on 10 November will be counted in the final results.

"[The number of ] ballots outstanding is difficult to estimate in Nevada because every voter was sent a mail ballot," the state elections office tweeted.

"Obviously, not all will vote."

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