Is Betteridge’s law of headlines (any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no) being observed solely on a technicality as, in Nevada, voters who refuse to affiliate with a political party are “nonpartisan,” not “independent?”

Perhaps — if our data is right.

Like most people, I generally prefer my personal choices to become more popular over time. Since I’ve never been registered to vote as a major party voter — I first registered to vote as a Libertarian, then changed my voter registration to nonpartisan after the Libertarian Party started opposing vaccines entirely and pushing arcane conspiracy theories — I was naturally intrigued when I learned non-major party voters now enjoy a registration plurality in Nevada’s two most populous counties (and, consequently, the rest of the state). I’ve been refusing to support the two major parties my entire adult life, so I was understandably overjoyed to see evidence of an increasingly large percentage of Nevadans joining me.

The Republican and Democratic parties are, after all, uncontrolled trash fires, especially in Nevada. 

Institutionally, the Republican Party in Nevada has been a mess for the better part of a decade. In 2012, the state party made headlines when Ron Paul’s supporters took over first the Clark County GOP, then the state party. Their enthusiastic yet amateurish efforts led elected Republicans, along with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, to create Team Nevada, a shadow party and fundraising organization, to try to route around the damage. Though Republicans enjoyed some success in 2014, due in no small part to Democrats taking that gubernatorial election off as a “gap year”, Republicans have largely become increasingly irrelevant — they haven’t won an electoral vote from Nevada since 2008, constitute less than a third of the lower house of the Legislature, have elected only one of Nevada’s four congressional representatives, and only have one statewide elected official willing to identify under their banner.

What are Nevada’s Republicans doing to turn things around? Just in the past year, the state GOP censured its highest ranking elected official, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, because she refused to use (and abuse) her position to fight the imaginary phantoms of voter fraud former president Trump conjured up on his way out of the White House (it later turned out there was a real case of voter fraud in the 2020 election — only it was committed by a Republican). That censure, along with a Clark County GOP meeting that ended in a near-riot amid reports of party officials inviting members of the Proud Boys to party meetings, made national news.

Since then, matters haven’t improved. The Clark County and state Republican parties just finished spending months in court trying to establish who will be unlucky enough to be considered legally responsible for the actions and budget of a recurring source of institutional embarrassment and shame. As for the Washoe County GOP, it expelled Michael Kadenacy, its former chairman, presumably in no small part because he refused to support the state party’s pile-on against the only Republican elected to statewide office.

Before Nevada’s Democrats conceptualize their key performance indicators and collateralize their vision and mission into electoral buy-in, however, it’s worth pointing out that the Reid Machine’s much-vaunted professional and managerial dominance over the means of Democratic institutional class perpetuation is rather visibly over. Like the state GOP, the state Democrats also made national news after self-styled Democratic Socialists seized control of the state party. To route around the damage, Nevada’s elected Democrats (and what’s left of the Reid Machine, including the state party’s six-figure bank account) moved their campaign operations to Reno and rebranded themselves as Nevada Democratic Victory. In response, the state party attempted to annex Nevada Democratic Victory as well. Since control over Nevada Democratic Victory, unlike control over the Nevada State Democratic Party, is actually important, however, it was swiftly and humiliatingly defeated.

Looking beyond the state party itself, Nevada’s elected Democrats and their supporters have been spending the past few years treating voters with something closely approximating open contempt. Freshman state Senator and former state Democratic Party Chair Roberta Lange put forward a bill in the last session, which I complained about at the time, which sought to make reelection easier for elected Democrats by introducing straight-ticket voting and making it twice as hard for minor political parties to qualify for Nevada’s ballots — her bill passed, though most of the most objectionable portions of her bill were ultimately amended out. 

Voter initiatives to reform the electoral process, by contrast, are swiftly met in court before we can even read and sign their petitions, much less vote for or against them. An initiative to create an independent redistricting commission was challenged in 2020 by a pastor with obvious ties to elected Democrats — the organizers behind that petition are filed again this year. Meanwhile, an initiative to implement ranked-choice voting is already being challenged in court by someone close to Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV).

On the one hand, as I’ve argued in the past, nobody cares (nor should care) about the sturm und drang of local and county party politics. State and county political parties were legislatively, judicially and procedurally defanged decades ago; even if they weren’t, most politics is national now and party identification has far more to do with cultural affiliation than any sort of loyalty to local political organizations. Journalists aren’t going to spend hours sitting through party central committee meetings unless they know a chair is going to be thrown or a riot is going to break out because, unless a chair is thrown or a riot breaks out, nothing of consequence can be accomplished at the meeting — central committees legally can’t do much else. As for the rest of us, it doesn’t take long to realize party meetings are an excuse for people to forcibly recruit everyone into some non-consensual live action role play, only instead of entertaining themselves in the privacy of their own homes with Dungeons and Dragons manuals, they’re wasting everyone’s time with Robert’s Rules of Order instead. 

(For the record, unlike Dungeons and Dragons, Robert’s Rules of Order is absolutely Satanic in origin — or, at least, sure feels like it is once anyone quotes it during a meeting. I, of course, have copies of the last three editions.)

On the other hand, whatever the effect party dysfunction might have on Nevadan voters’ willingness to identify with either of the major parties, it’s clearly not positive and it may be mutually reinforcing. Over the past twelve months, Republicans and Democrats both lost tens of thousands of voters each, while over 75,000 additional voters now identify as nonpartisan. The numbers for minor parties aren’t much better — all other parties, except for “Other,” lost overall voter share, and the Green Party lost nearly a sixth of its registered voters over the past year.

Before I break out the champagne and leave the party officials to their rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, however, I have one question — are there really more than twice as many voters writing in their own party affiliation as there were a year ago? 

In November 2019, 16,851 voters chose “Other Party” (and, consequently, the choice to fill-in-the-blank for their partisan party identification). In November 2020, after the DMV finally implemented automatic voter registration and began fulfilling its responsibilities in earnest, the number of voters who chose “Other Party” increased to 27,258. Most recently, the reported number of “Other Party” voters is 61,796 — a difference of more than 35,000 voters, including over 28,000 additional “Other Party” voters in Clark County alone. That means Clark County alone added more “Other Party” voters over the past year than there were in the entire state.

That’s not impossible. Clark County has over 70 percent of Nevada’s population, registered voters, and registered drivers, after all. It just seems a little improbable, and perhaps worth double-checking.

The reason I ask is because public service agencies in the United States do a notoriously poor job of sharing data and information with each other — a systemic issue which has been plaguing the CDC throughout the pandemic, but is certainly not unique to it. This is especially true when an agency like the DMV, which has been struggling at considerable expense to modernize its systems for years, and is now trying to figure out how to refund some of the money it collected from us to fund its thus far unsuccessful system modernization, is tasked with collecting new data and transmitting it successfully to another agency.

Don’t get me wrong, Nevadans growing increasingly frustrated about the increasing dysfunction of our two largest political parties would confirm my priors and biases. I’ve been frustrated with the increasing dysfunction of our political parties for years and I think every other Nevadan should be, too. It’s impossible to look at what the Republican and Democratic organizations have been up to in this state, both among themselves and with the public at large, and conclude they need more power and responsibility than they already have. I also wouldn’t be surprised if many Nevadans, when faced with an opportunity to update their voter registration while they renewed their driver’s license, decided choosing to associate with a political party wasn’t worth the effort (I agree with this as well). 

But the idea that 35,000 additional Nevadans this year suddenly decided to write in their own party seems… odd. If it’s true, it’s a story. If it’s not, it’s a very different story.

One of two things is happening to our voter registration statistics — either more Nevadans than I thought are becoming interested in manually filling in blanks on voter registration forms than they used to be, or there’s going to be a story in this publication in the next month or two revealing that there was a technical issue between the Department of Motor Vehicles and the secretary of state. I don’t know which one it’ll turn out to be, but I’ll tell you this — it wouldn’t get easier to figure out how independent voters might vote if some of them don’t think they’re independent in the first place.

David Colborne was active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he blogged intermittently on his personal blog, ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate, and served on the executive committee for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, and the father of two sons. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].