Saturday marks the start of in-person early voting — a method that, along with voting by mail, vastly increases the opportunity for Nevadans to cast their ballots and has recently been embraced even on the conservative side of the political spectrum.

For more information about all your voting and registration options, visit The Nevada Independent‘s General Election FAQ page and take advantage of these extensive resources to inform your choices:

In-person early voting runs from Saturday, October 19 through Friday, November 1. Officials of all stripes are marking the occasion this weekend — Republicans including Senate candidate Sam Brown, House candidate Drew Johnson and Assembly candidates are headlining a breakout. the early voting meeting on Saturday.

Democrats, who have embraced early voting for several cycles, are bringing out former President Barack Obama — one of the most popular figures in the party — for a rally of their own on Saturday. The Harris campaign is bringing in surrogates from Nevada and California to deliver the message in Las Vegas and Reno.

Early voting is gaining popularity

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump spent months protesting mail-in voting and early voting, wrongly labeling these methods — long popular in the West — as unfair.

Republicans, trying to learn from their mistakes of 2020 and 2022, believe that not embracing these voting methods — and sowing distrust among their voters — was a mistake. In the 2022 midterms, about 51 percent of votes in Nevada were cast by mail and about 28 percent were cast in person.

In the 2020 presidential election, as the pandemic raged, the results were even grimmer: Only 11 percent of Nevada voters voted in person on Election Day.

In 2020 and 2022, more Republicans than Democrats took advantage of in-person early voting — but it was the least used method for both parties during the midterm elections. This cycle, Republican campaigns are fully committed to promoting early voting, even as Donald Trump has delivered mixed messages, calling it “stupid stuff” and insisting he prefers paper ballots while also starring plays at early voting meetings.

While the Republican Party is on board, they have also undermined their own message — organizing a presidential caucus, for example, where only in-person voting day was allowed instead of the state-funded primaries, which include vote-by-mail and early voting.

A Trump campaign official in Nevada said the campaign is not concerned about Trump undermining their message of confidence, and that Republican voters trust early voting because the state party and the Republican National Committee have been active in filing preemptive lawsuits against the secretary of state of Foreign Affairs – which the state and numerous judges have dismissed as unfounded.

Republican figures in the state, including Gov. Joe Lombardo, have been involved since last year in efforts to restore confidence on the right in non-Election Day voting methods, recognizing that parties can more efficiently target voters if they include members of can encourage their party to vote. asked. If more voters from a party cast their ballots early, party officials can spend the days and weeks before the election reaching the smaller group of those who have not yet voted.

“There has certainly been a shift to encourage voters to engage with the system, knowing that this is the new path forward,” the Trump campaign official said.

The launch of in-person voting and the pressure of the nation’s attention on the swing state of Nevada may be intense, but Clark County Clerk Lorena Portillo says her staff has learned from their 2020 experiences and prepared for a broad range of scenarios.

“I’m not going to get distracted by the fact that anything could happen, right?” Portillo said The Indies in an interview earlier this week. “No, we have the right plans, and we have the right protocols, and the people who were notified and were part of the plan are as confident as I am.”