On to Nevada

With the Iowa Democratic Party having royally screwed up its caucus process, many eyes turn to Nevada which apparently bought the same tallying app giving at least some of the problems. (I'd bet much was poor volunteer training -- training is hard, verging on impossible in a short space of time.) The Nevada caucus will come along February 22; besides Nevada, only North Dakota and Wyoming still use caucuses rather than primary balloting to choose their delegates. Can this party do a better job?

Naturally the Nevada Independent is on the story.

The statement released by the party was short, but its message was simple: What happens in Iowa, stays in Iowa. ... Even former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid chimed on the matter in a tweet Tuesday afternoon.

“In Nevada, we have built the best state party operation in the country,” Reid said. “I am 100% confident that what happened in Iowa will not happen in Nevada.”

... the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce, in an interview with The Nevada Independent last week, detailed some of the security precautions and preventive steps that the party is taking to ensure the integrity of the caucus process. ... The party has also established a number of backup processes, should the technology it plans to rely on fail. For instance, Democrats will be checked in at their caucus sites via a tablet, but each precinct will also have a paper copy of the Democratic voter file to cross reference. ...

With the apps, precinct chairs are supposed to, at some point before Caucus Day, connect to the internet to download the early vote data for their precinct. Party officials say the data will not be accessible by the precinct chair until the caucus’s noon start time and they have reached the appropriate step in the caucus process for it to be disclosed. The number of early voters for that precinct, for instance, will be available at the start of the caucus, but the precinct chair will not be able to see who they caucused for until it’s time to enter the results of the first alignment.

Should the precinct chair not be able to access that early vote data, party officials say there will be a hotline they can call to receive that information and calculate the results manually. Precinct chairs will also be able to call in the results of their caucus should the app malfunction. Nevada has more than 2,000 Caucus Day precincts this year, where Iowa had about 1,100. ...

There's plenty more and it is all complicated and demanding of volunteers. But what struck me was that huge number of precincts. That's a heck of a lot of volunteers that need training. Hope the state party succeeds!