Low turnout gives poll workers idle time

Already the poll workers looked bored.

They'd been there an hour. The sun wasn't all the way up yet. It was still kind of cool outside.

So, absent real work Tuesday morning, they read magazines. They munched on chips. They stared, quite literally, into empty space.

There was nothing else to do.

It wasn't like people were actually voting or anything.

Absent much excitement or conflict, Tuesday's primary election drew just under 15 percent of Clark County's nearly 700,000 registered voters, officials said.

That meant long pauses between action at the polls.

Even at the start of the day, when folks often hit the polls on the way to work, things were slow.

That was true at the smaller polling places, and at larger ones, too.

Take the Crossings Church in southwest Las Vegas, for example. The church is the polling place for five precincts totaling more than 2,400 active registered voters.

By noon, said Rik Holman, the polling place's team leader, 35 people had voted.

"I just wanted to make sure I voted for (District Court Judge Donald) Mosley," said Judy Norman, 57, the second voter there.

Why Mosley in particular?

"Because I'm his secretary," she said.

So at least she had a reason to get out of the house early. What about everyone else?

Peter Janangelo, 54, an accountant, said he generally votes Republican, but none of the races fired him up this time. He voted anyway, he said, because that's what he always does.

That didn't appear to be universally true at a polling place down the road.

At Alamo Elementary, the polling place for three precincts also totaling a couple thousand voters, things were slow for a time.

Though poll workers said things were moving along nicely, there wasn't any actual evidence of that.

For 30 minutes, from 1:08 p.m. to 1:38 p.m., not a single voter entered the place.