Southern Nevada residents cast their ballots Tuesday morning at the Desert Breeze Community Center during the June 11 Primary Election in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
Sunday, July 7, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Both Republicans and Democrats have stressed the paramount importance of Nevada’s role in the upcoming presidential election, but several election watchers are predicting the Silver State’s voter turnout will drop below 70% for November’s general election.
In the 2020 general election — which featured the presidential race between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican incumbent Donald Trump, voter turnout in Nevada topped 75%.
Michael Pruser, a Connecticut-based elections data analyst, says one reason he’s forecasting a drop is tied to Nevada’s voter registration system, in which residents 18 and older who apply for a state driver’s license or ID card are automatically registered to vote. Other reasons, he said, include policies that make it more difficult to maintain voter registration lists and a general lack of civic engagement.
Pruser said he was drawn to Nevada’s voter numbers because of its status among a handful of “states that truly matter on the board for the presidential election,” and its potential to tip the balance of power in the U.S. Senate with the outcome of the race involving Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen and Republican nominee Sam Brown.
In his research, Pruser divided voters in Clark County — where about 70% of Nevada’s registered voters reside — into three groups: voters who cast a ballot after January 2020; voters who registered prior to Election Day 2020 but haven’t voted in six years; and voters who registered after the 2020 elections and never voted.
The first group, he said, consisted of about 940,000 Nevadans “and you can bet 85% of all voters in 2024 will come from this group.” Those in the second group — about 180,000 people — were “very unlikely to cast a vote in ’24.”
He said the unaffiliated registered voters in the last group — nearly 250,000, compared with a combined 71,000 who affiliated as Democrats or Republicans — stand out, probably unaware they are registered and unlikely to participate in November’s election. As many as 80% to 90% of those unaffiliated, he predicted, would not cast ballots.
“I just wanted to shine a light to let people know that even though this list is growing massively over the last couple of years, it doesn’t really show what you think it shows,” Pruser said.
Nevada’s June primary elections, where just 19% of registered voters cast ballots, didn’t boost prospects for a big turnout in the general election in November.
David Damore, executive director of the Lincy Institute and Brookings Mountain West and a political science professor at UNLV, is also among those forecasting a turnout below the national average when the general election results are tabulated.
Damore said Nevada doesn’t meet the three biggest drivers of voter turnout: “age, residential stability and education levels.”
“We’re a younger state, we have a very transient state, and we have the fifth-lowest college attainment in the country,” Damore said.
Damore also attributes this cycle’s expected decrease to the “overwhelming” automatic registration of unaffiliated voters and low enthusiasm for both Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, and Trump, who will be officially nominated as the Republican candidate next week in Milwaukee.
After tracking six years of the state’s election trends, Pruser believes Nevada is long overdue for cleaning its voter registration rolls.
“I would consider Nevada — and Clark County specifically — to be one of the loosest voter registration lists in the country because they probably have hundreds of thousands of voters overall who aren’t going to show up in November and probably don’t even belong on the active voter list,” Pruser said.
Other experts hear Pruser’s suggestion for a registration clean-up and think: “Absolutely not.”
For Sondra Cosgrove, executive director of Vote Nevada and professor at the College of Southern Nevada, every registered voter is real regardless of whether they have ever cast a ballot. She views inactive voters like the students she taught in online classes, some of whom sat idle and confused by the remote learning model.
Removing inactive voters from registration lists, Cosgrove said, “would be like me saying, ‘OK, well, I’ve got students in my online class who haven’t logged in, so I’m just going to purge them,’ as opposed to me reaching out and saying, ‘Hi student, do you need some help?’ ”
Pruser suggests that Nevada take stronger measures to change attitudes toward voting, pointing to the growing number of unaffiliated registered voters and the state’s closed primaries as an example. He said the way the system currently operates, it’s like saying that around 40% of voters don’t matter.
“It’s hard to build a culture that way,” he added.
Pruser isn’t joining the conversations across the country that believe in fraudulent or stolen elections. He still believes the process is “generally fair and secure” on a national level — he just feels angry with the state of Nevada.
Mail-in ballots being sent to all of the state’s residents is a key aspect of Pruser’s frustration with Nevada. In the 2020 election, he said ballots mailed to more than 150,000 active voters were returned as undeliverable. Nevada is unique in the sense that unsuccessful mailing attempts don’t move a voter to an inactive status, he said, and the state just tries again in the next election.
“In an average state, undeliverable mail for active voters is usually between 1 and 1.5%,” Pruser said. “But in Nevada, it’s 8%.”
Earlier this year, Vote Nevada organized its primary voter campaign to encourage people dissatisfied with both presidential candidates to skip that race if they want, but to participate in the local races on the ballots.
“With our 19% turnout, I don’t think that message got across,” Cosgrove said.
Cosgrove believes state election policy is more incomplete than it is inaccurate. The automatic registration policy is a step in the right direction, but Nevada’s civics education and voter outreach is failing its people, she said.
In her conversations with new voters, Cosgrove says she’s found that they are sometimes confused by the concept of closed primaries, and they don’t have access to a centralized outlet for their questions to be answered, which can discourage them from voting altogether.
“(Nevada) passed a law to say we’re going to do automatic voter registration,” Cosgrove said. “Where was the second law to say, ‘and this is how we’re going to help these new voters be civically engaged?’ ”
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