Nye County races must be staged again

Call it a do-over, election style.

Come Nov. 4, voters in Nye County will get one more crack at a pair of school board races that looked like they had been decided during Tuesday's primary.

State election officials on Friday ruled that the two contests never should have been placed on the primary ballot in the first place and ordered the races to be repeated during the general election.

Nye County Clerk Sam Merlino said the mistake was hers, the result of misreading state election law.

She reported the error to the Nevada secretary of state's office immediately after the Review-Journal brought it to her attention on Thursday.

"Every election you worry about whether you've done something wrong. All someone has to do is ask the question, and you think, 'Oh no,' " Merlino said.

One of the races pits incumbent school board member J.E. "Doc" McNeely against Kathleen Bienenstein. The other features incumbent Harold Tokerud and Courtland Ofelt.

Merlino said she thought state law had been changed recently to require nonpartisan races among two or fewer candidates to be decided during the primary as part of an effort to reduce the length of general election ballots in some counties.

That's why she placed the two school board contests on Tuesday's ballot, and that's why her office declared McNeely and Tokerud as the outright winners after the votes had been tallied.

Ofelt was surprised and more than a little upset to open the Review-Journal on Thursday and read that he had lost.

As far as he was concerned, the campaign hadn't even started yet.

"I didn't plan to get out there at all before the primary. Why would you? There's just two candidates," he said.

Merlino said she has lost sleep over the mistake, and she was glad to get an answer from state election officials when she did late Friday afternoon so she wouldn't have to fret about it all weekend.

What they told her, she said, is that there was "really no harm done." She would be let off on a technicality: While state law requires nonpartisan races between two candidates to be decided during the general election, there is nothing in the statutes that prohibits such races from being placed on the primary ballot first.

The good news for Bienenstein and Ofelt is that they are still in the hunt, and now they have a clear idea of exactly what they're up against.

On Tuesday, McNeely took 54 percent of the vote to Bienenstein's 46 percent, while Tokerud captured 67 percent to Ofelt's 33 percent, results that represent little more than an elaborate public opinion poll.

Frankly, Ofelt thinks he did pretty well for someone who didn't participate in any meet-the-candidates events or put up any campaign signs, which he considers a form of "visual pollution" anyway.

"I came up with a third of the vote. That's incredible," he said. "I don't have my name out there."

Starting next month, though, Ofelt aims to change that.

"I'm going to campaign voraciously," he said. "I'm going to get out there with the facts."

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