MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

There is a traditional view of elections American-style.

In a movie, one sees a mob of excited spectators -- that is, voters -- in front of a huge chalkboard, the old kind that actually used chalk and a blackboard that looks dusty from erasures.

Periodically someone yells that the upstate returns are coming in, or that Precinct Such-and-Such is finally reporting, and a yell spirals up from the mob, a yell dwarfed by that which ensues when the figures are hastily scrawled up and we can see that Candidate Baloney has decisively taken the lead from Candidate Malarkey, and we know the nation is safe for another two or four or six years.

Something like that used to take place here in Nye County, or so I am told.

At the very least, returns were announced as they were reported, precinct by precinct. Instead of a few drunks hanging out at the bar late at night, wondering what happened to all the excitement, they could cheer each up or down as it came in and drain the corresponding glass of beer or wine or hard liquor.

Not any more.

Today, according to County Clerk Sam Merlino, the returns aren't to be released to us, the people who, after all, put those ballots into the computer cartridges for recording, until every last one has been counted and toted up.

The secretary of state's office says she has every right to report all those votes made in early and absentee balloting as soon as the polls are closed. This year that would have amounted to somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, 9,000 voters, or a considerable percentage of the body politic here.

That's not asking a lot, right? The votes in those respects have been made and can be counted immediately, and we hope Merlino will institute such a policy in time for the next election, whether it is the biennial election in two years or even a recall or special election beforehand.

As an example of how pointless the effort to withhold those votes was, the big networks had already awarded the state to Sen. Barack Obama an hour and a half before any votes from Nye County were made public. I had just driven back from Channel 30/62, where we knocked off at 8 because no votes had been released, and when I got to Paddy's Pub, McCain had already conceded.

I felt as if I had passed through some electoral time warp along the way.

And that's just silly.

The reason for that, according to Deputy Secretary of State Matt Griffin, was Clark and Washoe counties had released their figures by 8:15 p.m. Those are the state's most populous counties, and what they say, except in the event of a scalpel-thin race, goes for the state as a whole.

Nonetheless, it was another 90 minutes before Nye County decided it was time to let anyone know how its votes had gone.

All that aside, Griffin also made it clear that withholding results was important only where the federal or state races were concerned. Nye County's race results were unrestricted, he said.

Merlino said the computers kept rejecting the cartridges used to count each precinct's votes. In her words, "We kept getting knocked off the network."

(One can only wonder what would have happened if one precinct's cartridge continued to not work. Would we still be waiting for results, or would Merlino have taken some action to ensure smoother reporting? Why not take such action immediately? Is there any assurance that the cartridges and computers will be improved in some way so that the next election won't have such problems?)

Merlino's suggestion that taking the ballots directly from Amargosa Valley and Beatty to Tonopah offers greater control and security doesn't make a lot of sense, or at least doesn't appear consistent.

One assumes the ballots that are counted in Pahrump are eventually locked in the vault in Tonopah. If so, does it really make any difference where the votes from Beatty and Amargosa Valley are concerned? Why should the votes counted in Pahrump be any more or less important where security is concerned than those from two much smaller communities?

And in any case, why can the votes for county offices not be reported as they are counted?

Maybe we need a registrar of voters in Nye County so the results can be granted the importance they so clearly deserve.

It may seem shallow, but there's a rich history in this country of election night excitement. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to consider the sheer drama of celebrants actually being on hand when the votes start to come in, instead of first telling them who won and only then giving them a hint of how it happened at the local level.