Nevada election results: State pauses vote counting until Thursday

All mail ballots and provisional ballots still left to count

Nevada has temporarily suspended vote counting in the 2020 election, and there will not be an update on the count until Thursday morning at 9am PT, which is 5pm in the UK. 

The state still has mail ballots received from Election Day onwards to count, as well as provisional ballots.

Around 75 per cent of the votes have been counted in Nevada so far with Joe Biden leading Donald Trump 49.3 per cent to 48.7 per cent, according to data from the Associated Press. 

The state has six electoral college votes up for grabs.

Mr Biden currently leads Mr Trump in overall electoral college votes — the Democratic nominee has secured 264 compared to Mr Trump’s 214 according to the Associated Press. A win in the southwest state could hand Mr Biden the presidency by putting him on 270. 

This year’s election has seen some of the slowest vote counting on record due to the massive influx of mail ballots which pollsters have to account for. In Nevada, ballots being submitted by mail must be postmarked by Tuesday 3 November and received no later than Tuesday 10 November to be considered eligible. 

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This means the full number of votes won by Mr Biden and Mr Trump might not be fully known until next Tuesday.

Many Americans took to Twitter to scold Nevada officials for pausing counting. One man responded to a tweet by the official Nevada Elections account, saying: “Is that a typo or did you really post that there would be no more updates for 27 hours in an election of this magnitude?”

Another man said the entire US system was a “farce”. He wrote: “I haven't a clue which side this will benefit because I know nothing about Nevada. But any electoral system that counts votes which arrive up to a week after voting day is a farce.”

Mr Biden’s lead of 8,252 votes, as of the latest count, is not totally secure either — thousands of mail ballots still need to be counted in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, which accounts for almost three-quarters of the state’ population.

There are currently 588,252 votes for Mr Biden and 580,605 for Mr Trump, with approximately 23,500 votes going to other candidates.

The move by Nevada comes after a last-minute, unsuccessful attempt by the Trump campaign to stop mail ballots in Clark Country from being processed using machines that automatically verify signatures. Mr Trump’s team said the process was not “transparent”, but Nevada’s Supreme Court threw the claim out on Election Day. 

Nevada is an historically Democratic-voting state, which Hillary Clinton narrowly won in 2016 by less than 2 percentage points.