Minority government continues

Voter turnout increased slightly in Nevada over the last midterm election, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, but it was still dismal.

Just 41.25 percent of the state’s voting age population cast ballots, compared to 36.8 in 2006. Nevada turnout has increased slightly in each midterm election since 1998, when it was 34.59, but there appears no danger of a majority of voters participating in elections any time soon.

Coupled with the way voters skip voting in some races, this also means that candidates are being elected by a number of voters in the high 20 percents of all those casting ballots.

Although there were numerous partisan predictions of voter fraud, few actually surfaced and those who made the claims tended to drop the subject after the election. The New York think tank Demos issued a report saying, “[N]oteworthy after Election Day had come and gone was the sudden silence from the fraud-mongerers and Tea Party poll watch groups, not a peep of one case of substantiated fraud at the polling place. Even Fox News decided to cancel a special report on voter fraud it had planned on Nevada because there was no fraud.”