Third-party candidates vie for congressional seat

Erin Neff

Friday, Oct. 18, 2002 | 10:12 a.m.

Richard Wayne Odell

Pete O'Neil

Three third-party candidates are begging for attention and unable to afford television advertising in the commercial-laden 3rd Congressional District.

But Pete O'Neil, 39, a bicycle league commissioner, has been running a grass-roots campaign for 15 months and thinks he will get 10 percent of the vote.

"I definitely have 10 percent," said O'Neil, an Independent. "The two major party candidates have not put this thing in the bank."

O'Neil and his domestic partner have three children, and O'Neil has been juggling his family duties with the need to campaign. He's been a lone voice on several issues this campaign, most notably with his assertion that Nevada should stop fighting Yucca Mountain and get its hands on what he estimates to be billions of dollars of nuclear energy industry money that could come with a settlement.

Richard Wayne Odell, 52, an Independent American Party candidate, is raising 12 children in Henderson and decided it was time to put his name onto the ballot.

"I've been complaining about politics and policies and people in the government, and I've wanted to change things," Odell said. "It was time to put up or shut up."

Odell said he thinks the U.S. Constitution has been emasculated in the guise of political correctness. He said he still believes in the system, but just wants to refocus government on "God's principles and the constitution."

Neil Scott, 35, is a Libertarian who thinks the main party candidates are wrong for Nevada.

"I want to set people free from bad and corrupt government," said Scott, a native Jamaican. "Dario Herrera and Jon Porter are the same old thing, the same old garbage in a new package."

Scott calls Herrera "the corrupt, closet Communist" and says Porter is "the invisible man."