Election Guide News, voter information MARK WAITE / PVT Nye County Clerk Sam Merlino places cartridges with election results from individual precincts into the computer on Election Night. RELATED STORY Residency not decisive in election Advertisement

By the time the results of the local elections in Nye County were released, most of the candidates at the Election Night parties had already gone home.

At an Election Night party for Nevada Assemblyman Ed Goedhart, R- Amargosa Valley, at the Pahrump Nugget Casino, a few inebriated patrons were among about two dozen people left of the couple hundred guests originally celebrating in the banquet room.

The national networks had colored Nevada blue for Democratic president-elect Barack Obama before 10 p.m., about 90 minutes before Nye County released its results. That's because Clark County and Washoe County, Nevada's two most populous counties, released early voting results around 8 p.m. to 8:15 p.m., Nevada Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Matt Griffin said.

Could Nye County's votes been made public earlier?

Nye County chose not to release any vote totals until both the early votes and Election Day results were fed into the computer -- about 11:30 p.m. -- even though more than 8,000 county residents voted early, more than turned out on Election Day.

Nye County Clerk Sam Merlino said she could release the results of early voting first, which can be tabulated before polls close at 7 p.m. but the results can't be released until after the close of polls.

Merlino was busy inserting cartridges into a computer Election Night, each containing the votes of one precinct.

Nevada Deputy Attorney General Brian Kunzi was monitoring the process at the clerk's office in Pahrump; a couple of members of the press were also allowed to watch.

Merlino said the computer network kept going down Election Night, popping out the cartridges and fouling the tallies.

The Nevada secretary of state's office also asked to see the results first, before they were released to the public, Merlino said. Workers in the county clerk's office in Tonopah and Pahrump have to run the tallies simultaneously; Merlino said they finished compiling votes at 10:20 p.m. but had to wait on the secretary of state's review of the results.

"It was just such a big controversial election they asked we not release results until they had seen them. Because we stopped in the middle of early voting, we probably could've sent early voting to them and said release those (to the public). We kept getting knocked off the network," Merlino said.

Griffin said the secretary of state's office put out a directive that county clerks weren't to release any statewide or federal results before sending them to his office, but he said county election results were not restricted.

"Obviously there was a threat of litigation over this election and what Nevada's position is, it was a battleground state. We didn't want anyone waiting in line to cast a ballot and have Nevada results pop up before they cast their ballot. That would've been a violation of a couple of state laws," Griffin said.

Griffin acknowledged Nye County's size, being the third largest county in the country, could delay the vote count. All the precinct results north of Pahrump, including Amargosa Valley and Beatty, are driven up to Tonopah on Election Night instead of being counted in Pahrump, as close as 35 miles away from Amargosa Valley.

Merlino said that eliminates having to transfer those ballot boxes twice, first to Pahrump for counting, then to Tonopah, the county seat, for storage in the vault.

"Because everybody in Nye County is concerned about the transport of ballot cartirdges it's more logical to transport them once and get them locked in the vault than to transport them to Pahrump and then back to Tonopah. That's just more chance of something happening," she said.

Merlino said it probably wouldn't cut any time off the Election Night vote count to tabulate Amargosa Valley results in Pahrump, since it takes about 90 minutes to pack up all the Pahrump precinct ballots, which aren't usually ready for tallying until about 9 p.m. It then takes about an hour and 15 minutes to tally all the 98 cartridges from Pahrump, she said.

Nye County also lacks the computers and the personnel of larger counties to process ballot counts quicker, Merlinio said. She noted that Clark and Washoe counties each has a registrar of voters.

Information from the Nevada Secretary of State's office show the earliest election results were available in Lander County, 8:53 p.m,. Humboldt County, 8:55 p.m., Storey County, 9 p.m., Pershing County, 9:04 p.m., Esmeralda County, 9:06 p.m., Carson City, 9:22 p.m. and Elko County, 9:28 p.m. By 10 p.m., results from Nye, Eureka, Lincoln, White Pine and Lyon County were still pending.

The Clark County registrar of voters quickly posted early returns, but didn't finish the complete tally until 12:07 a.m. the following morning, Washoe County ended up at 1:19 a.m.

Then again, Griffin seemed to think the public can be too impatient for election results, echoing the refrain of Obama campaign manager David Axelrod, who hesitated to gloat prematurely: "We waited two years for this night, we can wait a few more hours."

"People with the digital age, they expect real time, everything should be calculated and totaled immediately at the close of the polls," said Griffin. "This isn't like surfing the Internet, getting on Wikipedia. It's a process that has to be verified, has to be done the right way. If there's any missteps, especially on Election Night, they're going to be noticed and they're going to be scrutinized. So accuracy is paramount to expediency."

The totals for the 2008 general election in Nye County were ready far earlier than in November 2006 when results weren't released until 1:55 a.m. Wednesday. Merlino said that was a programming issue with Sequoia voting machines that hasn't happened since.

During the official canvassing of the election results Monday morning, Nye County Commissioner Butch Borasky told Merlino, "You guys did a fantastic job."