The challenge is what to do with the early caucus numbers once they have been tallied. The now-discarded app was supposed to make it easy. Officials said Thursday that they would not transmit the results of the early caucus sites to precinct captains until caucus day, when they will use the iPads.

Nevada’s early caucus process is relatively new, having debuted in 2008 after Senator Harry Reid pushed to move the state earlier in the primary calendar. Mr. Reid and other party officials have defended the caucuses as a way to engage grass-roots activists in the increasingly liberal state.

Mr. Reid, who is now retired but remains active in state politics, is widely seen as having one of the strongest state party apparatuses in the country. And he seems to view Iowa’s problems as an opening for Nevada to move even closer to the front of the line of presidential nominating contests.

“Iowa has forfeited its chance to be No. 1 — I don’t think that’ll happen anymore,” Mr. Reid said in an interview with Vice that was published Wednesday. Nevada, he added, is “really a state that represents what the country is all about.”

But with the debacle in Iowa, the pressure is on Nevada as never before. Officials from the Democratic National Committee have been dispatched to Las Vegas as the party continues to scramble and test other options. Tom Perez, the D.N.C. chairman, plans to arrive in the coming days.

“The D.N.C. is working with the Nevada Democratic Party and we are confident that they are doing everything they can to implement the lessons that have been learned from this process,” said David Bergstein, a spokesman for the committee. “We have already deployed staff and will continue to work with them in the coming days.”

But campaigns say that with just a few days until early voting begins and little clear guidance from the party, they are increasingly anxious that the process will break down before the caucuses begin. Party officials have said that they would rely on paper worksheets, just as they did in previous caucuses in 2008 and 2016. Still, the biggest challenges are dealing with two new demands this year: reporting both the raw total vote as well as delegate counts, and figuring out how to calculate the effect of early votes.