Following Nevada primary, questions linger about voting glitches in Clark, Washoe counties

Nearly a week after Nevada's primary election, officials are yet to look under the hood to see what caused glitches with Washoe County’s new voting machines.

County Registrar of Voters Deanna Spikula said her office was still working to finalize and audit results from last week’s primary election and had not had a chance to conduct a full assessment of what went wrong with the county’s recently unveiled, multimillion-dollar election hardware.

Officials last week said they were aware of fewer than 10 voters affected by well-publicized malfunctions that left some candidates off of ballots or displayed the wrong slate of ballot choices — potentially giving voters a chance to help decide races they weren’t eligible to vote in.

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Some of those contests were settled by a few dozen or a few hundred votes, raising the specter that voting machine issues may have cost candidates a fair shot at public office.

Reached Monday morning, Spikula didn’t deny that ballot display problems may extend beyond the small handful of voters who contacted her office on Election Day, but said she could only speak to the reported glitches ahead of a Monday meeting with the company that makes the voting tablets.

Only that company, Dominion Voting Systems, will be able to determine how many voters may have cast a ballot on a machine that improperly displayed or otherwise omitted eligible candidates, Spikula said.

Officials initially blamed those display issues on poll workers who may have incorrectly booted up the new voting tablets. Spikula said she didn’t know how long it might take to for Dominion to pinpoint any other reasons for the glitches.

“I want voters to feel like their vote counts and that their voice was heard,” she added.

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The county does not think the ballot display issues were related to earlier-reported glitches Washoe voters encountered with the “smart cards” needed to access the upgraded voting tablets.

Some voters at Billinghurst Middle School had to go through several such cards before their ballot was counted, though election workers reported they had those wrinkles ironed out within a few hours of polls opening on Tuesday morning.

Trouble with Dominion’s voting tablets — which cost $4.2 million to install in Washoe County alone — wasn’t limited to Reno.

Similar problems were also reported in Clark County, where state voting officials last week confirmed “isolated” incidents of ballot display problems in the state’s largest population center.

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, the state’s top elections official, did not directly answer further questions about the number of voters potentially affected by the glitches, instead directing a reporter to a state-authored diagram on Nevada’s voting system security.

Cegavske’s office did not return additional requests for comment on Monday.