Late mail ballots won’t affect Las Vegas council race

By Jeremy Twitchell

Thursday, June 4, 2009 | 2:12 p.m.

Two days after Stavros Anthony edged Glenn Trowbridge for the Ward 4 seat on the Las Vegas City Council by just 10 votes, Mayor Oscar Goodman announced this morning that the city found 18 mail ballots Wednesday that weren't counted.

But if the outcome of the election is changed by a recount, the 18 ballots that Goodman mentioned won’t be playing a part, Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax said. Nevada Revised Statutes require that an absentee ballot be received by the close of the polls on election day to be valid (NRS 293.317).

Goodman said this morning in a press conference that he "heard rumors that a number of (mail) ballots" were collected Wednesday morning from the post office. "I don’t know the status. … I understand there are about 18 ballots," he said.

Though Lomax is not responsible for counting or certifying the Las Vegas vote, he has overseen a number of county, state and federal elections and said the law on late absentee ballots leaves no room for confusion.

“It’s cut and dried,” he said. “We have to have them in our possession on the day of the election.”

Lomax said his office has a policy of making election day afternoon runs to the post office to make sure that every valid ballot is collected, and he believes Las Vegas does the same. But nothing can be done, he said, for ballots that arrive after the polls close.

“Every election, as you can imagine, there’s more ballots that come in the next day, then more the day after that and the day after that,” he said. “It’s just the way the world works. But the law’s about as clear as it can be in Nevada.”

The Las Vegas City Council is scheduled to canvass and certify the election results in a special meeting Monday; state law gives Trowbridge three days after that to file a recount petition. He has already indicated he will do so.

Goodman backed Trowbridge in the election because Trowbridge supports Goodman’s vision for a new City Hall; Anthony opposes the proposal. Anthony defeated Trowbridge by 0.16 percent in Tuesday’s election, with 3,309 votes to Trowbridge’s 3,299.