Short ballot lures low turnout

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, June 4, 2003 | 10:02 a.m.

With most of the Las Vegas Valley's voters casting their ballots on a single question, not candidates for office, overall turnout for Tuesday's general election was 12 percent, election officials said this morning.

But turnout in areas with contested races was much greater, Larry Lomax, Clark County registrar of voters, said.

In Boulder City, where Mayor Robert Ferraro kept his job by only 18 votes, 52.8 percent of all who were registered cast a vote. That came to 4,990 votes. In Mesquite, which had another hotly contested mayoral race, 56.1 percent of the registered voters cast ballots, or 2,806 people.

Early voting accounted for more than half of the turnout in those places.

In Boulder City, only 20.4 percent of voters cast their ballots on Election Day. In Mesquite only 15 percent of the total votes were cast Tuesday.

In Las Vegas Ward 1, where newcomer Janet Moncrief beat incumbent Councilman Michael McDonald, 29.2 percent of those registered cast a vote, which came to 8,424 people. Only 15.2 percent of them turned out Tuesday.

With the media focusing on newcomer Moncrief's surprise showing in the primaries, Lomax predicted before early voting began May 24 that the Ward 1 race would draw around half of all voters.

"I thought all that attention would bring more people out, but when we saw that so few voted early, we had to revise that," he said.

The low show of interest at the polls was standard for elections such as the library issue, Lomax said.

"It's hard to get people to come out and vote in that kind of election ... where they're voting on one thing only," Lomax said. The ballot question centered on a tax increase to fund more libraries.

The election official said it was "unfortunate more people don't participate in the process."