Early voting off to rapid start

Monday, March 31, 2003 | 9:22 a.m.

More voters have turned out to cast their ballots early so far in this election than in 2001 municipal elections.

So far more than 15,000 voters have turned out to cast ballots in elections for Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City and Mesquite. In 2001 slightly more than 10,000 votes had been cast after the second weekend of early voting.

One possible reason, Henderson City Clerk Monica Simmons said, is that more mobile voting sites are available in her city than in 2001.

For this election Henderson added seven mobile sites at places including grocery stores, community centers and a library. Polling stations are set up at the sites for two days at a time.

"The grocery stores have been really successful," Simmons said.

Clark County Voter Registrar Larry Lomax agreed.

"The city of Henderson has an additional mobile team and North Las Vegas started earlier, so it could partially be due to that," he said.

In Las Vegas, 6,811 of the 191,764 registered voters have cast ballots. In Henderson 3,965 of the 96,807 registered voters have gone to the polls. In North Las Vegas 1,529 out of 39,254 registered voters have cast ballots. In Boulder City 1,693 registered voters out of the total 9,399 have voted. In Mesquite there were 1,120 votes from the 4,864 registered voters.

Michael Bowers, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said early voting probably doesn't help one group of candidates over another. But early voting does have a major impact on campaign strategy, he said.

With early voting, candidates can no longer wait until the weekend before an election to launch major campaign initiatives, Bowers said.