Nevada Republicans hope for speedier caucus Tuesday

As the last tallies were counted Monday afternoon, two days after Nevada's Democratic caucus, the state's Republicans were hoping new steps will speed their caucus Tuesday.

An estimated 84,000 Nevada Democrats participated Saturday, state party officials said. The turnout was more than the 12,600 in 2012 — a presidential re-election year — but far less than the nearly 116,000 in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected to the White House.

Nevada Republican Party caucus director Greg Bailor declined to project turnout for Tuesday. In 2012, that caucus experienced a low turnout of 8.2 percent, or 32,930, of registered Republicans in the state, lower than 44,310 in 2008. Historically in Nevada, more Democrats are registered than Republicans.

The state GOP has streamlined its process so that fewer hiccups are expected compared with 2012. That year, a manual ballot recount, which took three days, was ordered because the number of caucus participants who signed in was different from the number of ballots.

"In 2016, we've instituted a statewide tabulation procedure that has been coordinated with all 17 counties, and all site managers have been trained on the procedure," he said.

The Republican Party in July started implementing a plan that included training at the county level, said Bailor, who was the state field director in 2012.

In the 2012 Republican caucus, the ballots were taken off-site to be counted, which created delays. This time, the ballots will be sealed in envelopes and turned over to about 150 site managers, who will tally the results, phone them in to the county parties and send photos of the results through their smartphones.

For Clark County, the state party consolidated 1,060 precincts into three dozen caucus sites, mostly at public high schools.

The budget for this year's caucus is larger than in 2012, since at one point, 11 candidates were in the presidential race, Bailor said. With Jeb Bush suspending his campaign after the South Carolina caucus, only five viable candidates remain in the race — Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Ben Carson and Donald Trump.

Another difference is while an estimated 14,000 Nevada Democrats registered to vote on-site, the Republican Party rules allow only those who registered on or by Feb. 13 to participate.

Clark County Democratic Party Chairman Chris Miller, who was a site coordinator on Saturday at Hyde Park Middle School in Las Vegas, said he was pleasantly surprised at the 900 participants at his location representing 10 precincts. The line was long, he said, but after the doors closed at noon, caucus workers were able to get everyone registered by 12:45 p.m.

The number of on-site registrations were slightly less than half of the 30,000 in 2008.

"Look, you can stand by the DMV all day and not register 14,000 Democrats," Miller said. "It's a huge win for us to get people engaged in the process."

The Democrats have been pretty smart about the caucus, strategically using it to build the party, register participants and involve activists, said Eric Herzik, political science department chairman at the University of Nevada, Reno. This will pay off in the fall, he said.

However, he could not say the same about the Republicans.

"The Republican party is not a well-oiled machine. Their 2012 caucus effort was a debacle, it took them three days to count the ballots," Herzik said. "The last thing the Republicans need are a series of challenges, complaints and malfunctions."

While 93 percent of the Democratic caucus precincts reported their results on Saturday, the remaining ones appeared not to have been reported until late Monday afternoon.

"While the overwhelming majority of precincts quickly reported back their caucus results to the state party electronically through either a toll-free phone number using interactive voice response (IVR) technology, or a secure web form, a handful of precincts took longer to report online because they opted to submit paper results," said Stewart Boss, press secretary for the Nevada Democratic Party.

Contact Adelaide Chen at achen@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0281. Find her on Twitter: @adelaide_chen