Ken McCall: Voters urged to study massive sample ballot

Monday, Oct. 14, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

That package that feels like a phone book -- don't throw it away.

Cynics may call it junk mail, but it's actually the sample for one of the largest ballots in Nevada history. And it's going to be very important come Nov. 5.

Voters in the county will be casting 42 to 48 separate votes, depending on where they live. There are either 19 or 20 ballot questions and between 23 and 28 different races to vote on.

OK, so maybe they're not as big as a phone book, but the sample ballots are a hefty 48 to 56 pages.

Then there is the "Amended Sample Ballot," which had to be mailed out because of a mistake in Carson City.

All told, the Clark County Election Department mailed out about 400,000 each of the sample and amended ballots on Saturday. Mail-in ballots will go out Wednesday. The county's printer estimated it used 2.5 million sheets of paper to print them all up.

Any way you look at it, it's a pile of reading.

It's not exactly best-seller material, either. Just the "Note No. 1" about the state's sales tax made my eyes glaze over.

But get past it. Besides the candidates, there are some important matters described inside. You get to decide on a dozen amendments to the Nevada Constitution, from rights for crime victims to requirements for recall petitions to term limits.

There are also a bunch of tax questions to be answered. And, let's face it, the way your government takes and spends your money can truly affect your life.

Besides that, says Registrar of Voters Kathryn Ferguson, if we don't do our homework, we could be facing some very long lines on Election Day.

Even with the quick and easy new electronic machines, it's going to take awhile to push all those buttons -- much less agonize over choices.

"We're urging the voters to please study their ballots," Ferguson says. "Look into it. Discuss it and make their decisions before they go to the polls and vote.

Ferguson is also urging voters to mark up their sample ballots and bring them along.

"Everyone who comes unprepared will make it that much longer for everyone else."

Ferguson and her people are on a mission to eliminate polling errors, which invalidated the primary and a special election last month in the Republican Assembly District 1 race, and brought intense criticism from some thunderheads raining down on the office.

It helped that the second special election last week came off without any errors. But Ferguson needs to produce a clean general election as well.

So the Election Department is doing all it can to make sure things go smoothly, revamping its training process and going so far as reorganize the duties of some of the polling place workers.

An extra worker has been added to each of the 115 polling places to help with the anticipated large turnout.

In addition, ballots for different precincts that share a polling place will be color-coded, as will the buttons that configure the machine for each precinct.

"My staff has worked night and day, no days off, since the primary election to revamp the training," Ferguson says.

The feedback from polling workers, she says, has been encouraging.

So has the performance of the computer network that will total the votes on election night.

The county now has four devices to read the results from the voting machines, which come in cartridges. There was only one cartridge reader for the Sept. 3 primary and results weren't available until 6:30 Wednesday morning.

In addition, Ferguson says, the computer network that will read the cartridges is working much faster than on the night of the primary.

Of interest to computer nerds: The better performance comes as a result of a change in computer brands. The office had been using Compaqs, Ferguson says, but has found that identically configured Dell computers to be "unbelievably faster."

From the hardware to the training to the logistics, Ferguson says, "We've tweaked everything to the greatest extent we can. ... We're expecting it to go very well."

But she's not going to even try to predict when the final results will be in.

"The major problem will be when will the polls close," she says. "That will be what will slow us down.

"Voter preparation will make all the difference in the world."

So hit the books, Clark County. After all, who among us doesn't want to make a difference?

KEN MCCALL is a Las Vegas SUN columnist. His column runs Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at 259-4095 or ken@lvsun.com

archive