LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The victory of "None of These Candidates" in the Republican primary over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley represents the most votes ever cast for Nevada's unique ballot option.
"None" earned 63% of the vote to Haley's 30%. That's 44,217 actual votes as of Wednesday evening.
The previous high was set in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 2014, when "None" defeated all candidates, earning 30% of the vote (or 21,725 actual votes).
In Nevada, "None" can't win: Votes are only counted for human candidates. So Democrat Bob Goodman was considered the winner of that 2014 primary. He went on to be defeated by then-Gov. Brian Sandoval.
Similarly, Haley will be considered the winner of Tuesday's primary, although she came in second.
How did it happen? A couple reasons:
First, Haley did not campaign in Nevada. As the presidential primary approached, she and her campaign claimed the state was "rigged" for former President Donald Trump.
Certainly, the Nevada Republican Party's decision to reject the primary and hold a nominating caucus on Thursday — while prohibiting any GOP candidates who filed in the primary from also competing in the caucus — gave an advantage to Trump.
But if Haley really believed the primary as well as the caucus was "rigged," why did she take the time to file in the first place? And, had she campaigned in the state and won, she'd at least have had bragging rights to have performed well in an election open to everyone.
Instead, her campaign manager dismissed the Nevada primary (and caucus) entirely. In an interview Monday with the New York Post, Betsy Ankney said:
"Nevada is not and has never been our focus. We have not spent a dime or an ounce of energy on Nevada."
Second, Haley was the victim of a widespread campaign by Republicans to vote for "None" in the primary and then caucus for Trump in the Thursday caucus. Gov. Joe Lombardo told The Nevada Independent that he would do exactly that, and many other Republicans seemed to have followed his lead.
The origin of "None of these candidates" on the Nevada ballot
So, where did "None" come from anyway?
Back in 1975, after the Watergate scandal roiled national politics, lawmakers in Nevada introduced a bill to place "None of These Candidates" on the ballot as an option in every race. The idea was to give voters a chance to express their lack of confidence in all of the named candidates.
According to minutes of the March 18, 1975 Elections Committee, bill co-sponsor Assemblyman Daniel Demers "...stated that the bill was not proposed to be an embarrassment to the candidate but it is a way to tell him to 'clear up your act' if you get into office."
Opponents argued that including "None" in every race would increase printing costs, create technical problems with vote-processing equipment and lengthen the ballot. Then-Washoe County Registrar of Voters David L. Howard said, "Philosophically, voters have other indirect methods of expressing their displeasure with certain candidates. For example, not voting at all, or calling their local registrar of voters office!"
Howard suggested the Legislature amend the recall statutes if they wanted to give voters a means to express their displeasure with lawmakers.
A resident named Norma Joyce Scott wrote in to suggest the option would cloud the ballot:
"If a person does not wish to vote for either or any candidate the spaces may be left blank. This certainly indicates nonconfidence," she wrote in a March 7, 1975 letter. "As confused as some of our voters get now, I dread to think what nonconfidence blocks would do."
But the "None" supporters eventually won out: The bill was amended to apply only to presidential races, and then amended again to include all statewide races (governor, U.S. Senate, constitutional offices and justices of the Supreme Court).
Then-Clark County Registrar of Voters Stanton B. Colton, who opposed the bill, wrote to Demers in March 1975 to highlight increased costs and other technical problems. But he added a line that seems prescient in retrospect:
"As an additional consideration we must conclude that one of the candidates voted upon will be elected, although hypothetically, the no-confidence vote may be greater than the total number of votes received by the winning candidate," Colton wrote. "By making the no-confidence vote public we may have placed an unnecessary stigma upon the winning candidate, who may prove himself to be a very valuable and worthy public official."
The stigma certainly persists, although the latter part of Colton's thesis has yet to be tested: Neither Bob Goodman nor Nikki Haley, who both lost to "None," has yet gone on to hold any office.
