Nevada, What Took So Long?

The U.S. presidential election may have been called for Joe Biden on Saturday, but the vote-counting was far from over. As Biden supporters danced in the streets this weekend, election workers in counties across the country remained inside windowless warehouses and dim office buildings, poring through mail-in and provisional ballots to determine the final results. That includes swing states with razor-thin margins such as Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, as well as solidly-blue states like California and Oregon.

In an election where a global pandemic and divisive incumbent drove record levels of voter turnout and a deluge of mail-in ballots, the slow pace of ballot tabulation was predicted. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating. Given its short-lived potential to determine the outcome of the election last week, the left-leaning swing state of Nevada (which the Associated Press called for Biden on Saturday) was for a brief moment one of the most closely watched — and memed — for its perceived sluggishness. On social media, Nevada was the sloth from Zootopia. Nevada was counting votes on one hand, then losing track and checking out his fingernails instead. While the world was “waiting to see who the next U.S. President is,” Nevada was playing solitaire.