Henderson voters trim mayor, council choices

Hafen took 37 percent and Kirk got 32 percent of the 16,720 votes cast. Trailing them were former City Councilwoman Amanda Cyphers with 16 percent, former Henderson Police Chief Michael Mayberry with 13 percent and personal injury attorney Richard Sipan with about 2 percent.

"I’m really pleased with the numbers, because we’ve been working hard to get our message out there," Hafen said by telephone from his election night party at the Henderson Convention Center.

Money also might have had something to do with the results.

Kirk and Hafen were the top spenders in their contest.

Kathleen Boutin spent about five times more than all her opponents combined and nearly won the Ward 3 City Council seat outright.

Boutin took more than 45 percent of the vote in the six-candidate race. She will face second-place finisher Cathy Rosenfield, whose name was marked on about 23 percent of the ballots cast.

The final winners in both contests will be determined in the June 2 general election.

Incumbent Henderson Municipal Judge Douglas Hedger won’t have to wait until then. He captured a second six-year term in Department 2 with a lopsided victory over Henderson Police Sgt. E. Matthew Zobrist.

Turnout was predictably low, though it did surpass what Nevada’s second-most populous city saw during the 2007 municipal primary.

Almost 13 percent of Henderson’s 131,678 active registered voters cast ballots, up from the 11 percent turnout two years ago.

Henderson City Clerk Monica Simmons said that this time around, there seemed to be more competitive races and more active campaigning for voters to get excited about.

The city also did what it could to make voting easier by junking the old system of assigned precincts and allowing voters to cast their ballots at any one of 15 vote centers throughout the city.

Some locations proved more popular than others.

At the vote center inside Henderson’s new north area police substation, it didn’t quite have the feel of solitary confinement, but election workers did seem a little lonely at times.

By 1 p.m., fewer than 80 ballots had been cast at the new substation on Sunset Road east of Boulder Highway.

"We think we could do better if we opened a bar, but they won’t let us in a police station," joked Carl Friedrich, team leader for the eight election workers at the station.

Terry Pierce moved from Las Vegas to Henderson two years ago, and he voted in his first municipal election there on Tuesday. The lack of people at the polls baffled him.

"The mayor and City Council have a more immediate effect on us than the president or Congress does. It takes them months to do anything back in Washington," he said after casting his ballot. "I have a hard time understanding why more people don’t vote in city elections."

Friedrich said Tuesday’s tranquility was a far cry from last year’s general election, when he was assigned to a polling location on the west side of Las Vegas that saw 1,206 voters on the final day of early voting.

Friedrich said workers could barely keep the electronic voting machines stocked with paper.

"We only had 10 machines and eight workers, and we were moving them (the voters) through as fast as we could," he said. "We couldn’t do anymore than that."

After 12 years as an election worker, Friedrich knows not to expect much action during a municipal primary, so he showed up for work on Tuesday with a large travel mug of coffee, a newspaper, a novel and a crossword puzzle.

Like Pierce, Friedrich said the lack of interest in municipal politics is a mystery to him.

"How many people go to City Council meetings? How many people go to planning commission meetings? In my opinion, the planning commission is where it starts. If you don’t go to those, you can’t complain about what gets built down the street."

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.