33K vote on final day of early voting for Democratic caucus

Nearly 75,000 Democrats participated in the Nevada Democratic Party’s first-ever early caucuses from Saturday through Tuesday, according to a party statement released Wednesday.

This total will be added to turnout from the traditional caucuses on Saturday to determine support for the seven presidential candidates on the Nevada ballot.

Democrats won’t commit to releasing the unofficial results of Saturday’s caucuses on the day of the vote, as they are emphasizing accuracy over speed in the aftermath of the chaos surrounding this month’s Iowa caucuses.

Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez said several factors, including early voting and potentially high turnout, could affect the tabulation and timing of results. In addition, Nevada, like Iowa, will be reporting three sets of data from the multistage caucus process.

Perez said he doesn’t know when results will be released. “We’re going to do our best to release results as soon as possible, but our North Star, again, is accuracy,” he said.

In 2016, 84,000 votes were cast in Nevada’s one-day caucus. Early voting was added this year to try to get more people involved.

“We knew that launching the first-ever early voting period for Nevada’s caucus would be a huge challenge to pull off, but the driving force behind this was wanting to bring more Nevadans into the process of selecting our Democratic nominee,” said Nevada Democratic Party Executive Director Alana Mounce. “These blockbuster turnout numbers show what we accomplished by making the caucus more flexible for voters.”

A Las Vegas Review-Journal poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers found that 59 percent of respondents planned to vote early. Other polls have pegged that figure at around 60 percent, and a majority of Nevada voters typically prefer to vote early. If the nearly 75,000 early voters represent 60 percent of the 2020 caucusgoers, turnout may approach or even exceed the Democratic record of 118,000 voters set in 2008.

Party officials also said the majority of early voters were first-time caucusgoers.

Perez, who joined a Culinary Local 226 picket line in Las Vegas on Wednesday, shared his input on the numbers.

“I’m really excited about the early vote numbers, Perez said. “They’re off the charts. We are working hard to make sure that we produce a caucus that is as low-tech as humanly possible while still maintaining efficiency.”

The influx of voters led to long lines at several polling locations across the Las Vegas Valley on Tuesday. Though some deserted the lines without voting, most stuck it out to submit their top three to five picks for the Democratic presidential nomination.

On Tuesday night, the Nevada Democratic Party demonstrated how these early votes will be added into the in-person totals from Saturday’s caucuses to determine delegates. The party plans to use a “caucus calculator” powered by Google Forms to handle most of the complex math required to award the state’s 36 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Nevada Democrats are hoping to avoid a repeat of the chaos that ensnared the Iowa caucuses. Unlike the November general election and state primaries that are run by state and local election officials, the caucuses are administered by state parties.

The large turnout for early voting comes after the state party had to make two major adjustments in its original caucus plans.

The Nevada Democrats had originally hoped to allow voters to caucus through their telephones, but the DNC scrapped the idea in September due to cybersecurity concerns.

The state party had also planned to use several apps to simplify caucus day for the thousands of volunteers, but the party decided not to use them after a similar app greatly disrupted the Iowa caucuses.

Contact Rory Appleton at RAppleton@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0276. Follow @RoryDoesPhonics on Twitter. The Associated Press contributed to this report.