When Nevadans head to the polls for this year’s midterm election, they’ll use a new process to vote in person. Officials say the changes will offer greater transparency and faster results, while keeping the experience of casting a ballot largely the same as in past cycles.
All active voters get a ballot mailed to them by default, which they can fill out at home and send back. They can also drop off completed mail ballots at polling locations and official drop boxes.
But they’ll also be able to participate in person during early voting, from Oct. 17-30, and on Nov. 3 for Election Day. If they do, they’ll cast their ballots with new voting machines, known as ballot marking devices.
Unlike previous cycles, the new devices won’t record ballots digitally. Instead, Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said the machines will print full-size paper ballots with each voter’s choices.
“Those machines may look like the same machines in the past, but in reality, they're glorified iPads,” he said. “There are no systems inside of them storing votes. There are no systems that are keeping vote records. All they are doing is making sure that printed ballot exists.”
In other words, the new voting machines will essentially act as a ballpoint pen. If that sounds familiar, it’s because officials rolled out the new process for the June primary election.
As recently as 2024, Washoe County’s voting machines still recorded voters’ selections digitally. At the end of the night, election workers would collect USB memory sticks from each device and upload them to a centralized database, where those votes were added to the total.
At the same time, voting machines would also spit out a paper audit record from a receipt printer next to the touch screen where voters made their selections. That provided a paper trail and summary of each voter’s choices, so they could confirm it was right.
Now, votes are digitally recorded after voters themselves feed their ballots into a scanner.
“Those results are what get uploaded into our EMS, our election management system. And that’s what’s being uploaded election night,” said Deputy Registrar of Voters Reggie Greer Jr.
A spokesperson for the county explained that more and more, election technology is moving in the direction of creating full, paper ballots. That’s partially because people prefer them. And while it’s more work to sort and store them than it was for the receipt-sized records of the past, officials like Greer want to make sure the process is transparent.
There’s another benefit to the new system, too: When it’s time to tabulate votes at the end of the night, it’s actually easier to use. There are far fewer scanners than there are voting machines, which means officials have fewer memory cards to process.
Ultimately, they said that should help them publish final results faster.
