Report: County has lost 50,000 registered voters

By Kyle B. Hansen

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | 7:14 p.m.

The number of people registered to vote in Clark County declined in the first quarter of this year compared to the previous quarter, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Voter Profile report, compiled by Applied Analysis, said the county had a 6 percent decline in the number of active registered voters compared to the last quarter of 2008, but added that the decline is not surprising since the last quarter included the presidential election.

The report also said the number of people moving out of Clark County could be a factor in the lower overall voter registration numbers.

The county lost 50,000 active voters, but a move within the county without reregistering can cause someone to go on the inactive list, so the effect of people moving out of the area is difficult to determine, the report said.

Almost 5,000 people registered to vote during the first quarter of this year, an 84-percent drop from the previous quarter but in line with other years that followed presidential races, the report said.

Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax had not seen the report Tuesday but said lower voter registration after an election is typical.

“It’s not abnormal,” he said. “Especially when there was such a fevered effort to get voters out in that last election.”

In 2004, the previous presidential election year, 291,000 people registered, Lomax said. The following year in 2005, only 57,000 people registered to vote.

Lomax said that so far this year, 22,000 people have registered to vote. He compared that to a single week early in 2008, the week of the presidential caucuses, when 26,000 people registered in the county.

Registration is expected to stay low in the coming months, but with a high-profile race for governor in 2010, Lomax said registration will pick up in the future.

“I do think next year is going to be pretty interesting and probably going to get a pretty good turnout in the primary as well as the general, because you have both contests for governor in both the Democratic and the Republican Party,” he said.

“If you look at the history of filing, if you have an incumbent in the office almost never does anyone in that person’s party run against them, and now the office is going to be completely up for grabs, and usually when an office is completely up for grabs a whole bunch of people put their name in there. It will be interesting.”

The trend in the first quarter showed a shift away from the Republican Party to registering as non-partisan. Of active registered voters in Clark County, 47.3 percent are Democrats, 32.2 percent are Republicans and 15.6 percent are non-partisan, according to the report.

Of newly registered voters in the first quarter, 44.9 percent were Democrats, 24 percent were Republicans and 23.2 percent were non-partisan.

“What I find the most interesting aside from the shift toward Democratic Party registration is the shift towards nonpartisan registration,” said Jennifer Ouellette, who worked on the report for Applied Analysis. “Year-over-year from Q1 2008 to Q1 2009 it’s gone from 17 percent of new registered votes to 23 (percent).”

“There’s just a general trend away from the Republican Party right now, which will be interesting to watch,” she said.

But the news wasn’t all bad for the Republican Party.

While the number of new GOP voters is lower than in the county as a whole, the report showed growth in the percentage of voters registering Republican in the first quarter this year compared to the last quarter of 2008.

Republicans’ share of newly registered voters in the first quarter this year increased 5.4 percent from the last quarter of 2008, to 24 percent of all new registrants. By comparison, the share of new voters to the Democratic Party fell from 52.7 percent in the last quarter of 2008 to 45 percent during the first quarter of this year.

The report says it’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of a GOP turnaround or an anomaly, because of the small number of new voters during the quarter.

“If there has been a shift, it’s been pretty minor,” Lomax said.

Applied Analysis created the report independently based on data from the election department’s voter database, Ouellette said. The company began monitoring voter registration trends during the presidential race.

“It’s just something that when we looked at it in the third quarter (last year) it was interesting and we just want to monitor it going forward to see what events might trigger a change or an increase,” Ouellette said.