Via the Las Vegas Sun:
One Republican and one Democrat will vie in the September special election to replace U.S. Rep. Dean Heller, under a ruling today by the Nevada Supreme Court that rejected Secretary of State Ross Miller’s open ballot rules.
In a 6-1 decision, the court agreed the state law governing the special election for the U.S. House is ambiguous. But the court decided that if the 2003 Legislature had intended the special election be a free-for-all, it would have explicitly said so when it originally wrote the law.
In the absence of a strong legislative record, the court deferred to past practice and other state statutes that allow political parties to nominate their candidates. The court also cited the fact the secretary of state’s office never wrote the required regulations for conducting a special election.
“While this court might typically defer to a secretary of state’s interpretation of an ambiguous election statute, when the secretary of state fails to … adopt regulations… such a deference is inappropriate,” the court found.
This doesn't change anything, of course — a lower court had already ruled against a free-for-all. So this means the battle between Republican Mark Amodei and Democrat Kate Marshall will proceed as planned. Republicans Kirk Lippold and Sharron Angle have already said they would not run as independents, so any hope of splitting the conservative vote is probably quite dim.