Election horror stories may spur changes

Kirsten Searer

Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004 | 11:05 a.m.

Some lawmakers and county registrars said they hope this year's election problems will prompt the Legislature to enact meaningful election reform.

Huge ideas for change are being proposed or resuscitated, including same-day voter registration or even moving the primary up to the third Tuesday in May.

County registrars are arming themselves with stories of election mishaps such as military ballots that went out too late and poll workers who dissolved into tears after dealing with aggressive poll watchers.

"Even though the count in Nevada came off very good, it was an extremely difficult election and very costly," said Carson City County Clerk Alan Glover.

Sen. Barbara Cegavske, R-Las Vegas, who will chair the newly reorganized Legislative Operations and Elections Committee, said she attended a meeting with county registrars two weeks ago and was horrified at stories told about the election.

She and at least one other senator, Dennis Nolan, R-Las Vegas, already have introduced bills to reform the state's initiative and referendum laws.

But Cegavske said she was most appalled at stories told about the way poll workers were harassed by poll watchers, many of them from out of state.

"I never ever thought that we would be sitting there talking about whether or not people who are poll watchers should be from the state of Nevada or not," she said.

Police were called to polls twice in Clark County because of squabbles involving poll watchers, and one poll watcher called Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax in tears, he said.

"We had a team leader calling me sobbing, saying she couldn't take it anymore," he said.

Clerks hope to clearly define who can watch polls, where they can sit in a polling place and how far they can take their activities. One poll worker in rural Nevada, for instance, was followed for miles by a poll watcher because she was carrying a disk with vote information.

One of the main priorities for county registrars is to move back the date of the primary, perhaps to as early as the third Tuesday in May instead of the Tuesday after Labor Day in September.

Registrars have been asking for this for years, but legislators have resisted. Dogged by lawsuits and people registering between the primary and general elections, registrars said it was almost impossible to be ready for the general election.

Clark County, for example, had to print out 288 different ballots in English and Spanish, Lomax said.

"We're approaching the point where it's just physically impossible to get it all done," he said.

Worst of all, county registrars had difficulty getting ballots out to people overseas , including people in the military.

"I'm really surprised that the Justice Department and the Defense Department did not get all over our case on that, and maybe they still will," Glover said.

Lawmakers have objected to moving the primary to summer months because many people take vacations at that time, registrars said.

But a May primary could increase voter turnout, said Washoe County Registrar Dan Burk, who pointed out that Nevada's primary comes right after Labor Day.

"We put the primary on the day after a holiday and the turnouts are miserable," he said. "They're down in the teens and the low 20s in these primaries."

Others want to clean up the state's laws regarding initiatives and referendums.

If there was anything that threatened to hold up the election this year, it was the plethora of lawsuits designed to stop, speed up, add or subtract signatures relating to initiatives and referendums.

Clark County waited until the last minute to print its ballots because of lawsuits relating to the Keep Our Doctors in Nevada initiative, which was held up in the courts.

Carole Vilardo, president of the Nevada Taxpayers Association, said she hopes to support legislation that would set a deadline for people to file challenges against initiatives or referendums.

She also supports the idea of requiring clear interpretations of the initiatives to be presented to voters when they sign petitions and when they open their sample ballots.

Others want to require initiatives or referendums to deal with just one issue. Too many voters didn't know what they were supporting this year, Vilardo said.

"What you want, bottom line, is an informed voting public irrespective of whether they vote yes or no on the question," she said. "The idea is they vote because they understand and they like or don't like what it does."

Already at least three bill drafts for the 2005 session have been submitted to clarify or change laws on initiatives and referendums.

Secretary of State Dean Heller is working with the county registrars on most of these issues, though they disagree on at least one key idea: Same-day voter registration.

Heller supports the idea, which is in use in Minnesota, Maine, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Wyoming and Idaho and has been shown in studies to increase voter turnout.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., also has strongly supported the idea for several years because voter registration is effectively closed off one month before the election, said his spokeswoman Tessa Hafen.

"A month is way too long to cut off registration," she said.

But county registrars actually oppose this idea, saying it could cause more voter fraud.

"It's unanimously rejected by all the clerks," Glover said. "If you want voter fraud, that's probably the best way to do it."

Same-day registration also could cost the state millions of dollars to hire staff members and confirm personal information quickly before people can cast ballots, Glover said.

The clerks do agree that they had no control over groups that brought in paid workers this year to circulate voter registration cards.

Some have charged the groups with forging, destroying or losing voter registration cards, leaving some voters disenfranchised and county clerks sifting through registrations for fake people or people who were registered without their knowledge.

The clerks would like to hold companies accountable for forms that they check out. Carson City, for example, issued about 4,000 voter registration cards to third-party groups and got about 1,000 back, Glover said.

"What happened to the rest of them? They just disappeared," Glover said.

What's worse, county clerks said, is that they couldn't get district attorneys to prosecute cases of fraud in voter registration cards. Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax found hundreds of forged cards yet said not one person was prosecuted.

Lomax would like a more clear law that gives district attorney's an in to file charges against people who circulate voter registration cards.

"In my eyes, they just got away with it," he said. "That's basically because there's no laws that govern it. They can do pretty much anything they want to do."