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Nevada’s special election law passed in 2003 asked the secretary of state to promulgate regulations, which were never enacted by then SOS Dean Heller, whose impending appointment to the U.S. Senate will spark the first such balloting in state annals.
That’s just one of the many twists in the coming chaos, which will have the nation focused on Nevada as the first test for the House matrix going into 2012.
I have already given you some of the background here:
The bill, passed in 2003, is here:
You can see that the process is relatively clear – a free-for-all, not using the party committees – but Section 7 is important:
"The Secretary of State shall adopt such regulations as are necessary for conducting elections pursuant to the provisions of sections 2 to 7, inclusive, of this act."
That was never done, so here we are, with other statutes calling for the party committees to be involved in vacancies, although – and I’m no lawyer – this one is specific to House vacancies.
I received an interesting email from Brian Woodson, who was the intern for then-Assemblyman Richard Perkins and who presented the bill in 2003, as you can see from my previous post. It reads, in part:
“The language I chose to use in 2003’s Assembly Bill 344 was specifically chosen so as to provide either the 2003 legislative body or the Secretary of State more discretion over the exact procedures of how the special election would be conducted. After all, as the bill was written by me, an intern, without having had received any oversight from any official whatsoever, it was the body of the 2003 Session that ultimately chose to accept, pass, and sign into law my bill ‘as is’ without even so much as considering the ambiguity of the language in the bill. You should’ve further noted in the article that I didn’t even receive so much as a single question by any member of either legislative body about the substance of the bill. Why should it be left up to an intern to decide the exact language of the procedures?”
And this: “Do our state legislators truly even read every bill that come across their desks? If our own representatives in the U.S. Congress seem unwilling to do so, why on earth would we expect our part-time legislators in Carson City to be any different? Perhaps this little incident may lend some support to the notion of a full-time legislature, but hey, who am I to suggest such a ludicrous idea. I’m just a former intern.”
I asked Perkins about his former intern’s claims and he tells me the bill was reviewed by many sets of eyes, including his and the Legislative Counsel Bureau’s. When I asked him about the imperative to promulgate regulations, he told me because the measure was passed in reaction to 9/11 and the potential for a sudden vacancy: “The intent was to be able to respond rapidly to a catastrophe. The regs would have been integral to that.”
So now it’s up to Secretary of State Ross Miller to propose a method, set the regulations and….await the lawsuits.
Tough choice for Sandoval, give Heller a boost or keep Angle out of a free-for-all that favors her. I would think part of it hinges on whether or not anyone would run against Angle, should she win a special election, in a primary next year.
All things considered, I think the Republicans will decide that keeping Ensign's seat in 2012 is more important than CD2 at this point in time given the substantial majority they have in the house already.
Bessy has a pathetically low threshold for happiness.
No doubt the stage is set for the Republican Party here in Nevada to rip each others faces apart in the coming weeks.
I hope they shred each other to pieces til there's nothing left.
The voters need all the help they can to get rid of them. Even though it may be inadvertent, they can help too.
Bring on 2012. Major gains by the Democrats to fix the screwed up political landscape in Nevada.
How much is this special election going to cost the people of Nevada in $ we don't have? Cronyism above thoughtful reason. Fail, again, Sandy.