Saturday marks the start of in-person early voting — a method that, along with universal mail voting, vastly expands the window of opportunity for Nevadans to cast their ballot and has been newly embraced even on the conservative end of the political spectrum.
For details on all of your voting and registration options, check out The Nevada Independent’s general election FAQ page, and take advantage of these in-depth resources to inform your choices:
In-person early voting runs Saturday, Oct. 19 through Friday, Nov. 1. Officials from all stripes are marking the occasion this weekend — Republicans including Senate candidate Sam Brown, House candidate Drew Johnson and Assembly candidates are headlining a get-out-the-vote early voting rally Saturday.
Democrats, having embraced early voting for several cycles, are bringing out former President Barack Obama — one of the most popular figures in the party — for a rally of their own on Saturday. The Harris campaign is bringing in surrogates from Nevada and California to hammer home the message in Las Vegas and Reno.
Early voting gains favor
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump spent months railing against vote-by-mail and early voting, falsely denigrating those methods — long popular in the West — as crooked.
Republicans, trying to learn from their 2020 and 2022 mistakes, feel that not embracing those methods of voting — and sowing distrust among their voters — was a mistake. In the 2022 midterm, about 51 percent of votes in Nevada were cast by mail and about 28 percent were cast early in person.
In the 2020 presidential election, with the pandemic raging, the results were even more stark — only 11 percent of voters in Nevada voted in person on Election Day.
In 2020 and 2022, more Republicans than Democrats took advantage of in-person early voting — but it was the least-used method for both parties in the midterms. This cycle, Republican campaigns are going all in on promoting early voting, even as Donald Trump has delivered mixed messages, calling it “stupid stuff” and insisting he would prefer paper ballots while also headlining early vote rallies.
While the state Republican Party is on board, they’ve undermined their own message too — hosting a presidential caucus, for example, where only day-of in-person voting was permitted rather than the state-funded primary, which included mail voting and early voting.
A Trump campaign official in Nevada said the campaign is not worried that Trump is undermining their message of confidence, and that Republican voters trust in early voting because the state party and Republican National Committee have been active in pushing preemptive lawsuits against the secretary of state — which the state and numerous judges have dismissed as baseless.
Republican figures in the state including Gov. Joe Lombardo have been engaged since last year in attempting to restore confidence on the right in non-Election Day voting methods, acknowledging that parties can more efficiently target voters if they can drive members of their party to vote early. If more of a party’s voters cast a ballot early, party officials can spend the days and weeks before the election conducting outreach to the more narrow group of those who have not yet cast a ballot.
“There’s definitely been a shift to encourage voters to engage with the system, knowing that this is the new way forward,” the Trump campaign official said.
The launch of in-person voting and the pressure of the nation’s attention on swing state Nevada can be intense, but Clark County Registrar Lorena Portillo says her staff has learned from their experiences in 2020 and has prepared for a wide range of scenarios.
“I do not get distracted about the fact that something can happen, right?” Portillo told The Indy in an interview earlier this week. “No, we have the proper plans in place, and we have the proper protocols in place, and the folks that have been made aware and have been part of the plan are very confident, as much as I am.”
