Nevada Releases Returns - A Day Late

I think Miss Peabody's fourth grade class could have done it faster (and probably just as accurately), but Nevada's Republican officials are finally getting the state's vote reported from the caucuses -- most of which were held Saturday morning. The hold-up was the vote from Las Vegas, which accounts for more than half of the state's votes. It seems that some precincts (especially one "troublesome" precinct) had reported more votes than the number of caucus goers on their sign-in sheets.

The Clark county Republican officials, along with officials from the state party, the national party, representatives of the four candidates, and lawyers representing all parties have been arguing over the few votes in question for the last 24 hours. I guess they have now finally come to some understanding, although the crazy part of it all is that the number of votes being argued over are not nearly enough to make a difference in the delegate allocation (the only reason for the caucuses in the first place). Evidently, some people just enjoy arguing.

The most important fact this year about the Nevada caucuses (other than the delegate allocation, of course) is the turnout. The state had their first caucus in 2008 and 44,324 people attended (about 11.08% of the state's registered Republicans). They were hoping to build on that this year, and party officials had predicted a turnout of around 70,000. That didn't happen. With 100% of the precincts reporting, the turnout had only reached 32,894 -- less than half of the voters predicted (and only 8.22% of registered Republicans in Nevada).

That's a significant drop-off from 2008 (over 11,000 less voters), and just like in Florida, shows the Republicans are not really as enthusiastic about their presidential hopefuls as party officials would like for us to believe.That has to worry them, because the leading candidate (Romney) just doesn't inspire the rank-and-file Republicans -- and that could carry over into the general election.

With 100% of precincts reporting, here is the vote total (with delegates won in parentheses):

Mitt Romney...............16,486 (14) -- 50.12%
Newt Gingrich...............6,956 (6) -- 21.15%
Ron Paul...............6,175 (5) -- 18.77%
Rick Santorum...............3,277 (3) -- 9.96%
TOTAL VOTES...............32,894

Here is the accumulated delegate count:

Mitt Romney...............84
Newt Gingrich...............29
Rick Santorum...............14
Ron Paul...............11

1,143 delegates are needed to win the nomination.