Nye County sheriff concedes contentious race

Dan Pineau said he expects to be Nye County’s next sheriff after initial results showed him leading against incumbent Joe McGill.

McGill conceded that he was not expecting to win the race, even when Nye County releases more election results.

“I don’t think it’s going to change the total outcome,” McGill said Wednesday.

Pineau had received 61.9 percent of the vote as of Wednesday morning, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office. McGill had received 38.1 percent of the vote.

The Nye County race will be decided by a relatively small number of votes when compared with more populous Nevada counties. State officials had counted 8,129 total votes for Pineau as of Wednesday morning, and 5,012 votes for McGill.

Nye County still has about 6,000 votes left to report between mail-in ballots and Election Day votes, said county spokesperson Arnold Knightly, and more results were expected to be released on Wednesday. But both candidates said they expect Pineau to come out on top.

“At this point, I think the numbers are going up,” Pineau said.

Pineau said he was excited but not surprised by the outcome of the race, based on his interactions with voters during his campaign.

The end of McGill’s term has been shadowed by controversy after it was reported that the Department of Public Safety was investigating his use of law enforcement databases. State officials found that sheriff’s office employees, including McGill, failed to document over 100 searches for people’s personal information, which law enforcement is able to access when conducting investigations.

State officials have said McGill was not under criminal investigation for the searches. The sheriff’s office was recently ordered to enact policy changes to address the misuse of the databases.

A Nye County official blocked McGill from accessing the databases for months while state investigators completed an audit into the sheriff’s office. Nye County Manager Brett Waggoner previously said he instructed that Nye County official to reinstate McGill’s database access last month.

Both candidates said they thought the controversy affected the outcome of the sheriff’s race.

McGill previously said all the searches he conducted were for law enforcement purposes.

“I’m very disappointed in the fact that I could not beat the lies,” he said.

Contact Katelyn Newberg at [email protected] or 702-383-0240.