Well, the SoS is apparently trying to treat this as a non-partisan office. I’d try to get a judge to order an injunction and order the parties involved to put up a single nominee from each, since this is clearly a partisan office. As was pointed out recently, there is no precedence for a U.S. House special election in NV history, but that’s no excuse to try to pull off an undemocratic farce such as this. Even in Louisiana, which was infamous for its “jungle primaries”, it still required the top-two vote-getters to compete in a runoff if neither got above 50%. With this current scenario in NV, you could have Marshall win with, say, 25%, while another 15% went to other Dem candidates and the remaining 60% went to the combined GOP candidates (all getting from the teens to low 20s).
If they fail to rectify this they need to have a come to Jesus meeting with all the Republicans. Anyone who doesn’t play ball gets blackballed for life.
I agree, Governor Sandoval should order that each party designate a single nominee, as is the case for other partisan elections in the state. That’s how special elections for state legislative seats are run, right?
But having everyone and his brother run and whoever gets the most votes wins (without a run-off) is not unprecedented in U.S. House special elections: that’s how Hawaii runs special elections (at least for the U.S. House), which is why Charles Djou was able to get elected to Congress despite only getting 39.4% (while Democrats Case and Hanabusa split 58% and the other 11 candidates split the rest).