Finish Line Fast Approaching for Swingy June 11th Primaries
Our Substack has a recap of our recent original reporting plus bonus content.
It’s been a fast and furious primary season here in northern Nevada, where we are getting external media attention due to being swingy in a swing state, one of the rare competitive areas in our upcoming gerontocratic top of the ticket November showdown, with a key Silver State Senate race to boot.
The presence of the self-proclaimed crypto made Robert Beadles at Washoe County meetings, in campaign donations, hateful Franklin Project mailers and text message, social media including the curatorially hyperactive 775 Times, numerous election related lawsuits, and at panels, such as Redmove Nevada at the Atlantis in April, has been a story line picked up by outlets from around the world.
Other still pending lawsuits from the right are claiming voter rolls have many registrations at businesses where no one lives, that too many people are registered to vote here and that late arriving mail in ballots shouldn’t be allowed.
Speaking of imperfect voter rolls, it’s been reported nearly 25,000 ballots have already been returned as undeliverable to Washoe County, while 900 were flagged with signatures needing further confirmation before being counted, with an almost equal number coming from registered Democrats and Republicans. That compares to a measly 34,000 votes being counted as cast properly by mail-in voting, according to the latest available county figures.
USA Today recently had an article in which Beadles was mentioned extensively, over fears, depending on how voting goes, that potential non certifiers of elections could hold a majority at the County level, which could throw the whole electoral process for a loop, loopier even than what we’ve recently gone through.
Any problems and existing challenges with our voter rolls and ballots will keep getting special attention, so Cari-Ann Burgess, our top county election official, the third registrar of voters to hold the post in just four years, with a complete staff turnover since 2020, will have this primary season as a test run for much higher stakes up ahead.
So far, as expected, registered Democrats have been much more eager to send in their mail-in ballots, while registered Republicans are known to prefer in person voting at polling stations.
Election Day will take place Tuesday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for voting on machines but with all the mail-in ballots arriving for several days after, it will be a while before we get final results.
Mailer fatigue has been hallmark of this election as in many other recent ones, with the added twist of some lazy and disingenuous ones getting attention for the wrong reasons.
Locally, some candidates have been banding together despite political divides on social and these so-called election integrity issues as insurgents, anti-establishment, anti-system candidates, not wanting to toe lines of business as usual and insider cliques.
Particularly infuriating to some in Reno is how the new redrawn wards conveniently put incumbents running in this cycle in different races, all of them initially selected and not elected to serve, after previous members stepped down abruptly for other opportunities.
Meanwhile, another current Reno council member Naomi Duerr is running for a state Senate seat, even though her current elected term is not even halfway through.
In the new Ward 6, all the candidates are new at this level, meaning results in the southern area of Reno may reflect what works to succeed in a local primary, be it old school networking, social media activism, op-ed articles, door knocking, community presence or an effective combination of these.
Recap of our Recent Original Reporting
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