GOP Braces for Nevada Caucus Mayhem on Tuesday

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Republicans, who hold their caucuses in Nevada on Tuesday, are bracing for a much tougher night. Party officials here and in Washington fear a repeat of the 2012 debacle in which it took officials days to count just 33,000 ballots and certify that Newt Gingrich finished second behind Mitt Romney. The combination of a disorganized and underfunded state Republican Party, decentralized responsibility for reporting results and an electorate that has never seen a competitive presidential caucus has GOP officials bracing for logistical nightmares Tuesday.

Unlike in Iowa, where the state parties recruited Microsoft to build a high-tech caucus results reporting system, or New Hampshire and South Carolina, where state elections officials conduct the primaries, in Nevada county GOP officials have responsibility for holding local caucuses, counting ballots and reporting results.

Here in Clark County, which includes greater Las Vegas and 73% of the state’s population, Republican volunteers at each of the 36 caucus locations will count ballots by hand, write the results on an envelope, take a photograph of the envelope and text the photo to Ed Williams, the Clark County Republican Party chairman, and to state GOP officials. The state party is also allowing the Associated Press to monitor the results as they come in from precincts; in 2012 the party announced results itself on Twitter.

“The official number will be whatever is photographed,” Mr. Williams said.

The new reporting method should be an improvement over 2012, Mr. Williams said, when officials at some Las Vegas-area caucus sites packed ballots in their cars and drove them to the county party headquarters, where they were counted. At the same time county officials elsewhere in the state emailed their results to state headquarters in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets—but because many precincts had been recently renumbered, columns didn’t line up properly, forcing manual counting of the vote totals during the days after the caucuses.

Before any caucus votes are cast, senior Republicans in Washington are suggesting that if Nevada’s 2012 problems resurface, it will be at risk of losing its place in the front of the party’s presidential nominating calendar.

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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign has instructed supporters to place their cellphones in the video mode as they enter caucus sites and record anything that looks suspicious, according to a person familiar with the matter. The state party is so stretched for volunteers that it has asked elected officials to volunteer at some caucus sites.

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