Picking Ensign’s successor

Senator John Ensign’s announcement last night that he would resign before his term ended seems likely to send Nevada electoral politics into a state of confusion.

Ensign’s resignation will be effective as of May 3 and Gov. Brian Sandoval will appoint someone to replace him.

“Under Nevada law, the Governor has the authority to make an appointment of some qualified person to fill the vacancy, who shall hold office until the next general election,” said the Governor in a statement Friday. The appointment, he said, would be announced before Ensign leaves office.

It is expected that Sandoval will appoint Rep. Dean Heller, who currently represents Nevada’s second district and had announced his intention to run for Ensign’s Senate seat when his term ended in 2012.

Sandoval’s statement, however, insists that this is not a foregone conclusion. “I take very seriously the importance of this appointment,” he said, “so to speculate on potential candidates for appointment before then would be premature.”

But if he does appoint Heller, as many are speculating, the issue arises of who will replace him in Congress and how that special election will be run. Three Nevada laws conflict regarding how an election would work, and as Nevada Republican Party spokesperson Mari Nakashima pointed out, “there’s no precedent” either.

“From what I can divine from our muddled laws here,” explained David Damore, a Political Science Professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “…there are basically two scenarios.”

The first scenario, he said, “is the party central committees pick their candidates and those are the ones that appear on the ballot.”

“The other scenario is you basically make it a jungle,” he said. Any candidate who wished to run could do so, pending approval by the Secretary of State.

Republicans, says Damore, would favor the first scenario. The district leans Republican, so if there were only one Republican candidate on the ballot, that person would likely do well. Democrats, on the other hand, would be helped by the second option, which would likely pit multiple Republican candidates (two have already declared for the race) against a single Democratic candidate. If no single candidate won a majority, the top two candidates would have a run off.

NEXT: The two scenarios would be very different for candidates