CityLab Daily: Nevada, What Took So Long?
Also today: Talking to the designer of D.C.’s new Veterans Day memorial, and Amazon lures food-stamp shoppers.
A Clark County election worker scans mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department on November 7, 2020 in North Las Vegas.
Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images North AmericaBetter late than never: On social media, Nevada was portrayed as the sloth from the movie "Zootopia," slowly poring through mail-in ballots while the country anxiously waited to find out who the next U.S. president would be. Even as the election was called for Joe Biden on Saturday, Nevada and several other swing states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona were still counting votes.
But while outgoing President Donald Trump and his supporters use the drawn-out election to cast unsubstantiated doubt on the vote-counting process, experts tell Laura Bliss and Sarah Holder that what happened in Nevada serves as a “wider-than-usual window” into the time it takes to carefully execute a major policy change that led to a historic surge of absentee ballots. The result was a lot of paper and several new processing steps for a state that previously relied on mechanized processes — and some lessons that extend past 2020. Today on CityLab: Nevada, What Took So Long?