By the numbers, Democrats doing something right

Nevada Democrats can't stop talking about voter registration. That's because voter registration keeps giving them something to talk about.

The party has been making steady gains for about the past year, building an edge in registered party members over the Republicans that continues to widen. But last week, the numbers spiked abruptly.

From April 2 to April 9, according to the secretary of state's office, Democrats had a net gain of 1,611 registrations, putting their statewide advantage over the GOP at 45,696.

That's a bigger registration gain in a single week than in the entire month before the 2006 election. In October 2006, Democrats gained 1,033 voters more than Republicans did during that period.

In the week leading up to April 2, Democrats' net gain was 274.

The run was continuing late last week. On Wednesday and Thursday, another huge gain for the Democrats was recorded, with 753 more new registrations over Republicans.

Gains were recorded in all the Democrats' targeted districts, as the party padded its advantage in Congressional District 3 and state Senate districts 5 and 6.

The state party's deputy executive director, Kirsten Searer, couldn't explain the sudden jump from one week to the next but was excited about it.

Democrats went into the 2006 election at a registration disadvantage of about 7,000 to the GOP. The Democrats began to take the lead in registration in April 2007, according to the secretary of state's office, and padded their lead by thousands with same-day registration at the Jan. 19 presidential caucuses, which the GOP didn't offer.

But Democrats point to post-caucus gains to make a case that enthusiasm for their brand is still on the rise. The results can't be explained just by having workers in the field registering people, as both parties do; there must be something in the air, Searer said.

"Even with a good registration program, it's so unusual for this many people to register this early in the cycle and for it to be so overwhelmingly one party over another," she said.

Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax agreed those were big numbers. He said registration has been on a record clip in the state's most populous county. Up to last week, he said, there had been 82,000 new voter registrations in the county in 2008, threatening to eclipse the 91,000 new registrations in all of 2007.

Lomax didn't know why the registrations would suddenly spike, but he said the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has been turning in thousands of voter registration forms lately, most of them Democrats.

FACING YOUTH

Secretary of State Ross Miller wants to be your friend online.

In an attempt to get young people to vote, Miller, who at 32 is the youngest currently serving secretary of state in the nation, has created profiles on the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

"All these 50-year-old secretaries of state had them before me," Miller said last week. "I was behind the curve."

Miller is making it a major initiative of his office to increase election participation by 18- to 24-year-olds. Turnout in that cohort was less than 50 percent in the 2004 election.

Miller said a presentation at the National Association of Secretaries of State talked about using social networking sites for voter outreach.

As of Friday, Miller's Facebook page wasn't reaching out to a whole lot of people. He had 41 friends, and his profile wasn't visible to the public.

Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson had 791 Facebook friends.

Miller wasn't the only state constitutional officer on the site. A page for Gov. Jim Gibbons had 135 supporters.

Despite his youth, Miller said he was going to need some help connecting with the population he's targeting.

"I've got big plans to get some college interns this summer to help me really connect with 18- to 24-year-olds," he said. "It clearly can be a tool if used effectively."

DO YOU RECALL?

The secretary of state's office is investigating whether fraudulent signatures were collected in the failed recall of Nye County Commissioner Peter Liakopoulos.

The recall petition was submitted in January with 759 signatures; 670 valid signatures were needed. But after Liakopoulos challenged the signatures, the secretary of state's office found that only 68 percent of the signatures checked were valid, and it was not certified to go forward.

The Pahrump Valley Times reported last week that some people have told investigators they never signed the petition, even though their names and purported signatures were on it. In the paper's analysis, 12 pages of the petition were full of "strikingly similar" signatures.

Investigators have been contacting people and asking them questions about the petition, the paper reported.

The office's elections deputy, Matt Griffin, told the paper that the results of the investigation, which should be finished in the next couple of weeks, would be sent to the attorney general's office, which can decide whether criminal prosecution is merited.

Liakopoulos has called for charges of forgery, perjury, filing false documents and conspiracy against the recall circulators.

The recall is among many obstacles to face Liakopoulos of late. As the newspaper put it recently, "Liakopoulos is batting a thousand, after defeating two ethics complaints, a recall petition and ... battery allegations. That leaves only a bribery complaint pending."

The bribery complaint charges that Liakopoulos told a member of the Pahrump Town Board he would support a half-cent sales tax increase if, in exchange, the board would name his wife curator of the local veterans' museum.

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball @reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.