As a Nevada law allowing mail ballots received up to four days after Election Day to be counted faces a legal challenge, a fresh look at Nevada’s 2022 vote count reveals the potentially election-flipping number of mail ballots that were counted despite arriving after Election Day. In just Clark County, nearly 40,000 mail ballots were counted that arrived in the days after voting supposedly ended, roughly 5 percent of the county’s total ballot count.
In that same election, Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt led Democrat incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto on election night but eventually lost by less than 8,000 votes statewide. For comparison, two years prior, Joe Biden narrowly beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election in Nevada by 33,596 votes.
In the closing days of battleground Nevada’s crucial 2022 U.S. Senate race, Laxalt pulled ahead of incumbent Cortez Masto. On Oct. 21, leftist organ Politico fretted over news that Laxalt had “inched ahead” of Cortez Masto as a “bad sign” for Dems, considering the former Nevada attorney general was down by 3 points a month earlier.
“Cortez Masto was long seen as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the Senate, the most likely to fall should a ‘red wave’ sweep the country and punish Democrats this midterm season,” wrote Vox senior politics reporter Christian Paz shortly after the election.
But the wave never materialized for Republicans in a midterm election that was supposed to be a referendum on an extremely unpopular president. While the
