EDITORIAL: Municipal voters tuned out

City voters in Southern Nevada sent a clear message in Tuesday’s municipal primary elections, when they gave every incumbent a resounding re-election victory: We don’t like off-year municipal elections.

Voter participation was shameful. Las Vegas, which saw a spirited mayoral campaign, had turnout of less than 16 percent. In Henderson, the figure was below 12 percent. Bringing up the rear was North Las Vegas at 9.4 percent.

But that was expected. Since 2007, total Clark County turnout for any municipal election has never topped 19 percent.

Voters aren’t engaged in the spring of odd-numbered years. And they don’t want to be engaged. That makes it next to impossible for well-meaning challengers to raise money and build the name recognition necessary to defeat incumbents. And incumbents use the power of their offices to command contributions from those who have business before them.

To wit, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman spent more than $750,000 to get about 20,000 re-election votes, and Henderson City Councilman Sam Bateman raised more than $400,000 for fewer than 8,000 votes. No incumbent lost Tuesday. And in 2013, the only municipal incumbent to lose was North Las Vegas Mayor Shari Buck. Her challenger, current Mayor John Lee, was a former state senator already familiar to city voters.

Then there’s the hundreds of thousands of dollars cities spend to stage elections. Henderson didn’t even bother with traditional precinct voting. On primary election day, voters could cast ballots at just 10 “voting centers,” a cost-saving step that further depressed turnout — just 3.5 percent of Henderson voters went to those centers Tuesday. Talk about an incumbent-protection racket.

To improve voter engagement and save money, the best solution is ballot consolidation. Clark County cities should stop staging separate municipal elections and combine them with statewide ballots held in the fall of even-numbered years. The city of Mesquite has taken such a step. It did not hold a municipal election this week — the next city ballot will coincide with the 2016 presidential election. Bravo, Mesquite. When a city government is selected by a tiny share of its residents, it cannot claim a mandate for anything.

The Las Vegas City Council incumbents who backed a now-dead subsidized soccer stadium — Mayor Goodman and Councilmen Bob Coffin and Ricki Barlow — won re-election despite public opposition to the project, despite aggressive campaigning by their opponents on the issue. And they very well might have won if they had been forced to campaign last fall instead of this spring. Congratulations are due to them. But they shouldn’t view their Tuesday victories as voter support for a new downtown giveaway to private developers.

More than anything else, it was support for the end of municipal elections.