Analysis of the Tea Party of Nevada Senate candidate signatures

I spent a couple of days last week analyzing the petition signatures gathered for the Tea Party of Nevada candidate, Jon Scott Ashjian. There were 66 petitions containing a total of 500 signatures. I am told that the Clark County Elections Department verified the signatures and ended up with 259 good ones. This is pretty normal, as when you gather signatures, about half of them are generally no good: Signatures of people not registered to vote at all, signatures of people who have moved, but have not updated their registrations, people who give information that is simply not legible and so impossible to verify, things like that.

Anyway, I had time to analyze 33 of the petitions, containing 253 signatures. Of those, I was unable to verify 131 of them, about 52% of the total I analyzed. This left 122 signatures that could be verified against the database (48%). So, with these numbers, it was probable that the Elections Department did actually get 259 good signatures.

Next, I analyzed the party affiliation of the people that signed the petitions, and what I found surprised me. I would have expected that the vast majority of the signatures would have come from registered Republican voters, or from those registered as Non Partisan, or even from Independent American registrations.

However, it was only a slight majority of these groups that signed the petition for the "Tea Party" candidate.

DEM	57	46.72%
REP	38	31.15%
NP	22	18.03%
INA	3	2.46%
LIB	1	0.82%
GRE	1	0.82%
TOTAL	122	100.00%

There were 38 Republicans (31% of the total), 22 were Non Partisan (18%) and only 3 were Independent Americans. At 57 signatures, Democratic voters held the largest percentage of petition signers at nearly 47%.

Parenthetically, I note that with only 3 Independent American voters signing the Ashjian petitions, the loyalty of Independent Americans to the party candidates is quite satisfying to me.

The next question that comes to mind is, "Why would a near majority of signatures come from people registered in the Democratic party?" For me, this is evidence that Ashjian is a stalking horse that has been fabricated by the Reid campaign in order to split the Republican and conservative vote. I have attended a couple of the Tea Party gatherings in this county and it is not my experience that nearly half of them are Democrats, itching to vote for a small-government conservative candidate. No, the reality here is something quite different.

With Sue Lowdon confessing that she would have supported the bailout bills, and with her history of fighting against grassroots conservatives in this state (never forget how she threw the Ron Paul Republicans under the bus at the Republican state convention), Lowdon is not a viable candidate behind whom conservatives can muster. The only true conservative in the race against Reid is Tim Fasano of Ferley, in Lyon county. If Tea Partiers want a candidate, Fasano is the one they should be backing.

Brad Lee Barnhill
Chairman, Clark county Central Committee,
Independent American Party of Nevada
brad@electbarnhill.com