Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Bush campaign to launch major absentee ballot drive

President Bush's re-election campaign is poised to make an unprecedented push for hundreds of thousands of Southern Nevadans to vote by absentee ballot in this fall's election.

The Bush-Cheney campaign told Clark County election officials last month that they planned to send out 370,000 unsolicited absentee ballot request forms to county voters, and this week some potential voters were getting prerecorded messages from President Bush to inform them of the effort.

"Nevada is clearly a battleground state," Tracey Schmidtt, a Bush-Cheney campaign spokeswoman, said Monday. "It speaks to how close we anticipate the race to be in November."

"Nevadans can expect to hear from the Bush-Cheney campaign, whether it is through volunteers going door-to-door, phone calls, (and) ads on TV," she said. "No effort is too small."

Although it's not unusual for campaigns to mail out absentee ballot requests to voters in hopes that they fill out the forms allowing them to vote by mail if they choose, the volume of Bush's effort has no equal in local history.

"There's not even that many Republicans in Clark County," said Larry Lomax, the county's registrar of voters. "I don't know who they're mailing it to."

Schmidtt said no particular demographic group is being targeted. "It's an indication of how aggressively we're working to turn out the vote."

Sean Smith, a spokesman for the campaign of Democratic presidential challenger Sen. John Kerry, said the effort smacks of desperation.

"It's clear that they're on the run, and they're nervous about the turnout of the Republican base," he said. "What they're hoping to do is lock up the people who'll vote for them."

But David Damore, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the effort is a smart tactical move by Bush.

"It's a way to ensure your people get to the polls," he said. "They've seen the demographic trends in this state, and it's not good for them. They need to get every Republican and Christian conservative to the polls."

"If this is a (big) turnout election, they lose. They don't have much else here" on the ballot, he said. "There's no gay marriage on the ballot, no prominent Republicans" to help turn out local conservatives.

Sig Rogich, a veteran GOP consultant who received one of the absentee ballot requests in the mail Monday, believes the mailers are primarily going to "inveterate Republicans first and foremost."

Titled "You Can Defend America's Freedom: Vote Today," the form includes comparisons between Bush and Kerry -- which favorably skew toward Bush -- and has a perforated tear-off sheet to register for the absentee vote.

Rogich called it "money well-spent" to lock up votes of Republicans who might otherwise fail to make it to the polls for whatever reason on Election Day. "I see no disadvantage in doing it."

This week, some local voters said they'd received automated calls bearing a message from President Bush, asking for their support and saying that an absentee ballot request form would be mailed to their homes.

Schmidtt did not know exactly when the calls began and how many would be made in Nevada. She said the president recorded the message over the weekend.

Schmidtt would not discuss how much the effort was costing the campaign, and she did not immediately know how many other states were being similarly targeted, though "it's being done in some other states."

Smith did not think the effort would attract undecided voters, which he described as a shrinking pool of people. "The 11 undecided voters left in Nevada will probably wait until the end, and they'll watch the whole game from start to finish before they cast their ballots," he said.

Lomax said the previous high for absentee ballot request forms was in the 2000 general election, when various campaigns mailed out a total of about 60,000 unsolicited forms to voters. About 50,000 people actually voted by mail.

As of Aug. 19, there were about 605,000 registered voters in the county. Of those, 220,153 were Republicans and 264,347 were Democrats, according to Lomax.

The county requires anyone intending to mail out more than 500 absentee ballot request forms to notify election officials of their intent to do so. No other candidate has made such a notification to date for the general election.

In Clark County's recent elections, about 12 percent of voters have voted by absentee ballots, with another 44 percent taking advantage of early voting. Only about 44 percent actually made their choice on the day of an election, according to Lomax.

Schmidtt dismissed comparisons to Florida, where the Republican Party last month briefly sent out mailers asking voters to vote by absentee ballots because of fears that electronic voting machines could fail to verify votes, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times reported.

Damore agreed that voting machine reliability isn't an issue in Nevada. "Nevada is on the cutting edge," he said.