While final numbers won’t be available until they are totaled by party officials, an informal count indicates that just under 1,000 Democrats turned out to express their choice for the next president in Saturday’s Carson City caucuses.
An informal review of the scoring sheets from more than half the precincts indicated that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg were the most popular of the candidates, scoring well in nearly every precinct.
Businessman/philanthropist Tom Steyer did very well in several precincts as did Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
Elizabeth Warren qualified for delegates in several precincts but didn’t do as well as many in the party expected.
Joe Biden, however, struggled, failing to qualify for delegates in a significant number of precincts.
How those performances translate into delegates is a mathematics problem for party leadership to sort out. Party officials have made it clear people shouldn’t expect results from the caucuses until Monday or later.
In the wake of the mess in Iowa, the Nevada party scrapped using a high-tech app that failed in that state. Each precinct captain was instead issued a secure iPad to report results.
Visits to the three Carson City sites found a relatively sparse turnout Saturday morning. Michael Greedy, in charge of the Carson Middle School site, said the reason is undoubtedly the high turnout in three days of early voting last weekend and Tuesday. In Carson City, 2,337 Democrats voted early. The statewide total was almost 75,000.
Greedy said well over 300 voters attended the Carson Middle School site.
Marty McGarry, First Vice Chair of the state party and manager of the Eagle Valley Middle School site, said that venue also had more than 300 attendees.
Pioneer High School had a significantly smaller turnout in part, Greedy said, because far fewer people even know how to find it.
Another reason for the lower than hoped for attendance is that the party’s materials spelling out the process didn’t inform voters that, while the three sites opened at 10 a.m., no one could enter and participate if they weren’t there by noon when the process of forming presidential preference groups began. A number of folks were turned away at each of the three sites.
McGarry said that and other glitches reported in the information on the website will be dealt with when officials conduct their review of how things went.
McGarry said there were also several precinct captains who had to call the party hotline to sort out disagreements in how to calculate which candidates qualified for at least one delegate. Greedy said several precincts at Carson Middle School had similar confusion, especially in applying the math.
A mathematical formula will then calculate how many delegates to the county convention each of them gets. In Carson City, each of the 24 precincts has anywhere from five to 17 delegates to send to the county convention depending on the number of registered Democrats in that precinct.
Once the number of delegates for each presidential candidate is tallied, they will be forwarded to party officials ahead of the April 18 county conventions.
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