Democratic preseidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (Getty)
Democratic
presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are flooding
Nevada with volunteers ahead of this week's key nominating contest but
they face a problem -- the personal data they need to reach many voters
is out of date.
Nevada, which is more than a quarter Latino, was one
of the states worst affected by the 2008 financial meltdown, with
hundreds of thousands of families unable to pay their mortgages and
forced to move in a crisis that by some estimates hit minorities twice
as hard as whites.
With the foreclosed homes often switching hands
multiple times -- from homeowner to bank to investor and back to another
homeowner in just a few years -- keeping up with voters who at some
point lived in those homes is difficult.
The Nevada Democratic caucus on February 20 has
emerged as an unusually important test of Sanders' and Clinton's
political strength.
Clinton
is under pressure to keep her wide lead among Latinos, while Sanders
must erode it to show he has a path to the nomination that does not rely
mainly on the young white voters who make up the core of his support
base.
"This ongoing [foreclosure] crisis makes
reaching potential voters more difficult," Sanders' campaign said in a
statement emailed to Reuters.
The Clinton
campaign said the voter lists supplied by the Democratic Party needed
"significantly" more work to update, forcing them to spend valuable
canvassing time building up their own private data.
Las
Vegas, Nevada's biggest city, has seen some of the country's highest
foreclosure rates since 2008, topping more than 200 US metro areas from
2009 to 2011, according to RealtyTrac, a provider of real estate data
and analytics.
Data that might have been
corrected in the 2012 general election has, in many cases, already
fallen out of date again because the Nevada housing market has continued
to see wave after wave of foreclosures, the campaigns said.
Reuters
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