Tag: democratic national committee
Donald Trump, Defense Production Act

New DNC ‘Descent’ Ad Hits Trump’s ‘Four Years Of Failure’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Say this for the impeached popular-vote losing, white supremacist, wanna-be dictator, grifting demagogue squatting in the Oval Office—he makes for good opposition ad fodder. Like this one produced by the Democratic National Committee for Joe Biden called Descent.

"Five years ago Donald Trump descended to the basement of Trump Tower," the narrator says over video of that gross golden escalator ride he took to announce his candidacy. "For the last five years," it continues, "he's brought America down with him." Then the ad launches into a litany of what Trump has managed to destroy in just three-and-a-half years: "attacking health care for people with preexisting conditions; giving massive tax cuts to billionaires, not working families; praising white supremacists, stoking racial division; losing 300,000 jobs in a failed trade war with China; locking children in cages."

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DNC Reverses Course on Phone Voting in 2020 Iowa and  Nevada Caucuses

DNC Reverses Course on Phone Voting in 2020 Iowa and Nevada Caucuses

Cybersecurity concerns have prompted the Democratic National Committee to reverse course on offering a telephone voting option in 2020’s presidential caucuses in Iowa and Nevada. But those key early states may find another way for voters not present at February caucuses to take part—possibly by casting their ballots early at voting centers.

The DNC’s announcement on Friday came a week after the committee held its summer meeting, where its Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) continued reviewing each state’s 2020 plans. The DNC technology staff, an advisory panel, and the RBC co-chairs concluded that there was too great a risk of malevolent outsiders disrupting the “virtual voting” process that Iowa and Nevada had hoped to offer voters to increase participation.

“The statement will go into some detail on the views of the security and IT people at the DNC and their outside advisory panel. It will cite strongly the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian activity,” James Roosevelt Jr., the longtime RBC co-chair, said Friday.

Iowa, the first contest, and Nevada, the third contest, had been developing a telephone-based ballot—as well as related systems that registered voters, authenticated identity, counted votes and reported results—to increase participation beyond precinct caucuses.

“The DNC technology people are very skeptical about whether a reasonably safe system can be constructed,” Harold Ickes, a longtime RBC member, referring to online voting, said a week ago at the DNC summer meeting. “And point two, forget the technology, what if it melts down? What if the management of it doesn’t work?”

While there was much consternation—mostly aired in closed sessions—the Rules Committee faced a mid-September to approve how the state parties running caucuses, which also include Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas and Wyoming, will offer a way for voters to remotely participate. That inclusionary mandate was part of the post-2016 Unity Reform Commission report, which “requires absentee voting,” and its 2020 Delegate Selection Rules.

Roosevelt said the Rules Committee will hold a special meeting after Labor Day to formally vote on the recommendation to reject virtual voting in Iowa and issue a waiver that essentially would revert to the process used in 2016. An early voting or vote-by-mail alternative was being studied, although it might impinge on New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.

In Nevada, the alternative appears to be using early voting centers and special precincts on the Las Vegas strip. When asked what Nevada might do if it could not get approval for its virtual voting plan, its lone RBC member, Artie Blanco, replied that Nevada also planned four days of early voting.

Wyoming was also planning on using early voting centers. Hawaii was considering mailing ballots to registered Democrats. Alaska, in contrast, was still seeking to use a smart phone system that West Virginia and Denver have piloted for overseas military and civilian voters, as state party officials said cell phone service was more reliable than mail in rural areas where many Native Americans live.

Good Intentions, Gnarly Details

The goal of expanding participation in 2020’s caucuses goes back to healing the party’s splits from the 2016 presidential campaign. In its December 2017 report, the Unity Reform Commission said any caucus state should help people who could not be physically present to participate. Those voters include the elderly, shift-workers, people with disabilities, young adults and even college students.

A year later, the Rules Committee issued 2020 Delegate Selection Rules that built on the reform panel’s report. These rules said that “The casting of ballots over the Internet may be used as a method of voting” in caucuses. The rules also required caucus states to create a paper record trail for audits or recounts. Its members are the DNC’s procedural experts. They are not technologists. The RBC left it to state parties to fill in the details, and further relied on DNC technology, cybersecurity and voter protection staff to critique each state’s 2020 plans.

The virtual voting plans worked out by Iowa and Nevada were not the same, but they shared features. Both states wanted to use a telephone keypad for a voter to rank their presidential preferences. The ranking is intended to emulate the in-person caucus process, where participants vote in rounds as candidates are disqualified. (Candidates must receive 15 percent of the vote to be viable.)

A virtual caucus participant would have to register beforehand. They would receive instructions by email, including a log-in and PIN number. Certain dates and time windows would be open for virtual voting. Voters would dial in and hear recordings where candidates were listed in alphabetical order. They would enter numerical choices on their keypad to rank them, like paying a bill by phone.

Iowa divided all of its virtual voters into four precincts, one for each of its House districts. These votes would be tallied and added to the in-person precinct totals from the rest of the state. However, the virtual votes would only be awarded 10 percent of the night’s delegates. (As of this writing, the RBC has not yet approved that allocation.)

Nevada, in contrast, was more ambitious. It planned to give 1,700 precinct caucus chairs an app to let them announce the early voting results to people in the room, and then to report the in-person votes to party headquarters. A vendor would do the math combining the virtual and precinct totals for awarding delegates to the process’s next stage. (In June’s RBC meeting, Nevada party officials said that app was still under development.)

Both states had won conditional Rules Committee approval. However, final approval was dependent on having the DNC staff signing off on the systems to be deployed, as well as the committee approving the delegate allocation formula, and judging that any new process would be well-run. Suffice it to say that despite determined efforts by Iowa and Nevada state party officials, the DNC’s staff has so far not had completed voting systems before it to fully evaluate.

When the RBC met in July in Washington, it discussed the status of these virtual voting systems at a closed breakfast—but not in the open session. After meeting for five-plus hours on August 22, the panel was set to adjourn without discussing virtual voting states, when Ken Martin—DNC vice chair, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman, and president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs—spoke up.

“I want to be very careful in how I say this, but I want to express a deep, deep frustration on behalf of my colleagues in three very important states,” he said, referring to Iowa, Nevada and Alaska. “This is the third meeting we have now asked them to come to. They’ve incurred incredible expense to bring their teams too. And we put them on the tail end of a meeting, which we knew was going to go long, and leave no time for a very important conversation.”

At that point, Roosevelt replied that there were closed meetings scheduled the following day with RBC members, DNC staff, and party officials from the three states. “And I actually have more data that I would like to share with this committee in executive session as soon as we adjourn,” he said. The committee emptied the hearing room.

According to a report first published by Yahoo and Bloomberg, “the DNC [staff] told the panel that experts convened by the party [technology staff] were able to hack into a conference call among the [Rules] committee, the Iowa Democratic Party ,and Nevada Democratic Party, raising concerns about teleconferencing for virtual caucuses.” It continued, “The test and the revelation of hacking enraged party officials in caucus states who say the systems were not fully built and the hack of a general teleconferencing system is not comparable.”

Earlier in the week, the RBC, DNC tech staff, caucus state officials and vendors had a series of conference calls on security issues and to demonstrate certain system elements, said Roosevelt afterward.

RBC members later asked to confirm whether the DNC staff had hacked its own conference call would not comment. A contractor working with one caucus state said they had heard a rumor about the purported hack. An outside computer scientist critical of any online voting said the state party officials were correct; hacking conference calls was not the same as hacking a voting system.

However, it didn’t appear to matter. Showing the possibility of a hack, or even making the accusation, highlighted this approach’s vulnerability. Meanwhile, the larger takeaway among many RBC members was that debuting telephone voting was premature.

“Our tech team basically said that there was no company that can do this,” one member said, recounting the executive session.

Needless to say, Iowa and Nevada officials were upset. Committee members were also divided. Some said that the risks were too great to debut virtual voting in 2020’s early caucuses. Others said these states were doing what they had been told under the 2020 rules.

Looking for Alternatives

After that executive session, the RBC co-chairs, DNC staff and the caucus state party officials held more closed meetings. Those meetings continued this past week, culminating in Friday’s announcement to back off from virtual voting in Iowa. That decision was not unexpected.

As the dust settled at the DNC summer meeting, the sense gathered from hallway interviews was that the Rules Committee co-chairs were looking at other ways to expand participation, especially in Iowa. It appeared that a mix of voting by mail and/or early voting centers might be an alternative, if it didn’t conflict with the New Hampshire primary process.

Nevada’s RBC member, Artie Blanco, said her state already was planning on offering four days of early voting before the February 22 caucus. (Any voter would have to register several weeks beforehand.) Iowa, in contrast, did not anticipate offering an early voting option in its 2020 plan.

It would be premature to conclude that remote participation in 2020’s party-run caucuses will not occur. The Rules Committee has a history of looking for ways to meet their goals. It will be meeting after Labor Day, where it is expected to finalize the early caucus states’ plans, including possibly having early voting centers or a vote by mail option.

DNC Shelves New Panel To Oversee Party Spending

DNC Shelves New Panel To Oversee Party Spending

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A proposal to bring unprecedented oversight to the way that the Democratic National Committee spends the billion dollars it raises between presidential elections was rejected by the DNC Rules and Bylaw Committee Tuesday, after a spirited debate highlighting that there is no independent oversight reporting back to the DNC’s 450 members.

The decision did not come without some Rules Committee members saying that the oversight issue was legitimate. But they did not feel that creating a new elected committee to review the DNC’s spending decisions was the best approach. The oversight proposal was the last piece of business from the DNC’s post-2016 Unity Reform Commission recommendations, which sought to heal the party’s internal divides after that cycle.

“I am disappointed,” said Jim Zogby, a longtime DNC member and Arab-American human rights leader, who noted that Tuesday’s proposal was the latest in a series of efforts to introduce greater transparency and oversight before 2020’s election.

“We are clearly out of time on it,” he said. “But what I don’t think we are out of time on is empowering the membership and becoming a more accountable and transparent organization. And I don’t think that can be done unless it’s done in a democratic way through election of an independent group of members. I will be back, if I’m on the DNC, to raise it again.”

Zogby, who has been a DNC member for nearly three decades and has served on its top national party committees for half that time, reminded the Rules Committee that very few people in the DNC have any real impact on how the party spends its money.

“Look, I’ve been a DNC member—this is my 27th year. I was an executive committee member for 16 years. The issue of never seeing the budget, never being able as a member to evaluate the budget, sticks in my craw. I think it should stick in the craw of every member of the body,” he said. “At the end of the day, the ability to know how money is spent, and have some say in it, or, at least, as the [DNC] bylaws call for, to evaluate it, is essential for the governing body of any organization.”

“We shouldn’t have to wait for an exposé article to be written or a book to come out to tell us that there was a problem,” he continued. “We have to govern ourselves. We have to be able to, say, among ourselves, ‘I don’t like the way this loan got taken out.’ ‘I don’t like who got that contract.’ And it’s not a question of micromanaging.”

Some Rules Committee members were sympathetic to the concerns raised by Zogby on behalf of the Unity Reform Commission, but said that creating another committee to independently review spending decisions by the DNC Budget and Finance Committee was not the best way to achieve that goal.

“I strongly share the view that the DNC should be more transparent in terms of its budget and financial activity,” said Frank Leone, a Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) member from Virginia. “I don’t think this is the way to do it, though. It seems that creating a new committee and, basically, to second-guess the work of the DNC, I’m not quite sure is the best approach… And I think things have changed a lot in the last two years and that has to be recognized.”

Leone’s last point was referring to the current DNC leadership, under Chair Tom Perez, saying that the party’s spending has been much more transparent and accountable than in previous years. Another objection came from David McDonald, an RBC member from Washington, who said looking retrospectively could distract from current campaigns.

“If you just look at the cycle we are in right now, instead of focusing on the presidential election in 2020, it [the proposed oversight panel] would be in the process of gathering information about what we did in 2018, and discussing it, and trying to evaluate in the context of all of the other entities that were spending money in 2018,” he said. “It’s basically a proposal to have an independent entity do what the Budget Committee is already supposed to do.”

Zogby countered that retrospective oversight was a compromise intended to not interfere with the DNC’s current efforts. But he kept returning to his main point: that there was no substitute for independent oversight of the DNC’s overall spending decisions.

“The [DNC] chair simply cannot appoint the committee that oversees the finances of the chair and the expenditures that are determined by the chair. That simply makes no sense,” he said. “We would not get into trouble—and we have had trouble—if the Finance Committee… [had had] an oversight committee that can do the due diligence and report back to us, ‘This happened. That happened. This didn’t happen. That didn’t happen. We make these recommendations for the future.’”

Don Fowler, an RBC member from South Carolina and a former DNC chair (1995-1997), said the issue was that DNC members tended to be afraid of confronting their national party chair.

“The lack of appropriate supervision, if one wants to make that charge, of the chair and the administration in every DNC since [former chair] Bob Strauss [1972-1977], has been a reluctance to confront the chair—period. That’s the holdup,” he said. “If you create this new committee, the same thing will happen. The DNC has never confronted the chair about the matter of spending, and even the suggestions as to what should go into the budget have been almost non-existent.”

Zogby countered that wasn’t always true. In his prior efforts organizing ethnic caucuses inside the DNC, he said that he has repeatedly been able to get neither support nor answers about withholding financial support. But Donna Brazile, an RBC member from Washington who has been interim party chair, twice agreed that the real issue was strengthening the DNC’s top committees to challenge the chair—and possible White House pressures.

“I understand the frustration as well as the goals of the Unity Reform Committee in terms of trying to ascertain how the DNC can become a more transparent body, especially during an election year when we have the White House,” Brazile said. “And the White House, in many ways, is also dictating and controlling how decisions are being made—strategic decisions as well as how day-to-day operations of the party are being made.”

“We don’t need an oversight committee,” she said. “We need to strengthen the executive committee and the current budget committee to do their job—to provide accountability; to provide transparency. I don’t know about many of you, but when I was on the executive committee, I challenged the chair. I didn’t always win. And when I was [DNC] chair, both times, they challenged me.”

“But, Jim, you’re right, there are decisions that I made as chair from that interim period of 2016-2017, as well as 2011-2012, that the only institution that I had to reply to was the White House, and then, of course, the nominee,” she continued. “I would hope that we would find ways to take some of this [oversight proposal] language and strengthen existing apparatus that we have, because I do believe we are on that path that you’d like to see us on.”

But Zogby, in response, said that accountability, “no matter how cumbersome,” was the hallmark of democratic institutions. Friendly and unfriendly party chairs can come and go, he said, but that wasn’t the same as formally instituted oversight.

“The fact that the existing [Budget and Finance] Committee has improved their work is something that all Democrats should feel good about,” he said. “But none of that is the same as oversight. And that is the fundamental distinction. They [the Finance Committee] make the decisions and do all that stuff. At the end of the day, the empowered body of DNC members ought to have the opportunity to, in a structured way—not a meeting of 450 people [members]—to ask questions and come up with some recommendations independently of that committee.”

 

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

Iowa 2020 Democratic Caucuses Move One Step Closer To Vote-By-Phone

Iowa 2020 Democratic Caucuses Move One Step Closer To Vote-By-Phone

The Democratic National Committee is moving ahead with plans to offer a telephone voting option during 2020’s first presidential contest, the Iowa caucuses, even though big questions remain about the system’s technology, security, and vote-counting procedures.

The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee granted “conditional” approval to Iowa’s 2020 plan after spending two hours discussing the proposed “virtual caucus” system on June 28. The DNC staff highlighted their concerns and questions, ranging from a ranking of the top five candidates on the telephone ballot to the voting system’s technology and security. Top Iowa state party officials described and defended their proposal, expressing confidence in their likely vendors, prospective training, and other implementation details, but said they need the panel’s full approval before they can sign contracts and start building the actual customized system. Some Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) members—the party’s voting procedure experts—said that they need much more in-depth assessments before granting final approval.

“Is there any anticipated go/no-go date with the technology itself?” asked RBC member Yohannes Abraham, from Virginia, before the panel voted to give Iowa a month to work with DNC staff and return with answers. “This strikes me as not a simple thing to stand up, and there will be a point at which we’re game-time ready or not.”

Top Iowa party officials replied that they had been working with vendors to design a system to increase participation by offering a remote voting option, but that they were not making contingency plans because they are anticipating its successful deployment.

“We’ve had enough conversations with at least a couple of vendors that they are very confident that they can do this process because they’ve done much larger versions of this process,” replied Scott Brennan, an RBC member from Iowa and former state party chair. “We don’t anticipate there will be the need to have a go/no-go date, because we’re making unique changes to the Iowa caucuses, but the process that we are using is not necessarily earth-shattering.”

Some RBC members were skeptical, however. Many had lines of questioning in three areas flagged early by longtime DNC member and party lawyer Harold Ickes, from Washington, D.C., about “system overload,” “security” and “counting.” As former DNC chair and ex-presidential campaign manager Donna Brazile said midway through the discussion, the party is undertaking a daunting task.

“This is the most interesting proposal I’ve seen in my 20-plus years on Rules and Bylaws,” Brazile said. “I must tell you, it is as complicated as it appears on paper. So I am not ready yet. I’m concerned about the safeguards. And I’m also worried that we don’t have enough time to get to this point in 2020. This is the future, but I don’t know if we are there yet.”

But other RBC members were less perturbed, saying the still-developing caucus state plans were to be expected—from Iowa, and from Nevada, 2020’s third contest and one whose proposed off-site voting system is more complex than Iowa’s plans.

The DNC’s Unity Reform Commission created after 2016’s controversial nominating season directed that steps be taken to increase voter participation. That instruction led to the RBC’s 2020 Delegate Selection Rules issued in late 2018, which required that a new remote voting option be offered in caucus states, and that a paper trail of the voting be created in those states—in case the results are challenged and a recount ensues.

“I do want to reiterate that Iowa is doing this because we basically told them to,” said New Hampshire’s Kathleen Sullivan. “You [fellow RBC members] might want to keep that in mind.”

Iowa Presents Still-Developing Plans

The Rules Committee’s agenda at its June meeting was to review plans by 22 states to elect delegates to the party’s 2020 national convention, where the presidential ticket would be formalized. Three states were holding caucuses, which is not the same as primary voting.

Caucuses are like traditional New England town meetings where citizens gather, make speeches, and vote. Those present employ rounds of voting, where a candidate must surmount elimination thresholds (15 percent of the vote in the room) to stay viable, in contrast to winner-take-all balloting in primary elections. This process ends when no candidate has less than 15 percent of the total vote. Depending on the resulting percentages, the precinct caucus will then allocate a set number of delegates representing those candidates to the next stage in the process: Iowa’s county conventions. In between the voting rounds, the campaigns try to persuade voters to switch from their initial choices.

In 2020 the Democrats’ caucus states will include Iowa, which opens the nominating season on February 3; Nevada, which is third, comes on Feb. 22; and Alaska in April. Unlike most primary elections, which are run by government election officials, the state parties run caucuses and rent the voting system from vendors.

“Our goal is simple: to address the challenges that we knew exist in our process while preserving the spirit of the Iowa caucuses,” said Iowa’s Brennan, in a 20-minute opening presentation. “The plan before you does exactly that. Included in this plan will be the most significant changes in the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses since its inception in 1972. These changes will make the 2020 caucuses the most accessible, transparent and secure caucuses ever.”

“On caucus day, precinct caucuses in all 1,677 precincts [across Iowa will be] almost unchanged from the experience of the past 48 years,” Brennan said, emphasizing that most 2020 participants would not be voting remotely—but in precincts. But, for “those previously excluded—shift workers, single parents, people with disability or mobility issues, people working out of state or serving overseas—and others,” there will be six sessions of “virtual” or phone-based voting caucuses, where people who register beforehand can vote in varied time slots.

“During the virtual caucus, participants will find it similar to a precinct caucus,” he said. “Participants will find how to get more information on the candidates, the chance to be a delegate at the district or state level or an alternate to the [party] convention, and instructions on how to submit platform planks. And rank the top five choices for president, compared to [in-person caucuses and] precinct choices where people will rank their top two.”

The Iowa party envisions that people who want to vote early or by phone will register by mid-January. Registration will be online, as many states now handle voter registration. These voters will get an email with instructions and credentials—including PIN numbers—to access the phone-based voting system. Once inside that system, the voters will be presented with 23 candidate choices (the current number) and asked to rank their top five using their keypad.

The party has not said what kind of remote interface voters will use. It generally has called the process a “tele-caucus,” meaning one would listen to recorded instructions and type in numbers to make choices—as one might pay a bill over the phone. But hints were dropped that voters with other digital devices, such as smartphones or tablets connected to cellular signals or the internet, also would be able to use them. Brennan said there would be options for “real-time closed captioning, as well as language translation [and] ESL [English as a second language] interpretation for those that request it.” In other words, the system may work with older push-button landline phones, but it could offer features supported by a smartphone app or webpage—which is online voting. Those technical details were envisioned, not yet finalized, he said.

“We are still going through our RFP [request for proposal] process to determine the vendors who will be instrumental in making this process happen,” Brennan said. “Once that [process] is complete, we will be able to further determine exactly what the registration process, the order of events and the [count and delegate allocation] reporting will look like. Also, we will be able to build the security protocols around these systems for greater protection around hacking and outside bad actors.”

As Iowa Democratic Party Executive Director Kevin Geiken elaborated after the committee review, the system will have four main technical components. “There is the registration process,” he said. “There is the technology of hosting that small pool of people on a virtual caucus system, where they have to press certain numbers to get certain results. There’s the third challenge of being able to tabulate those votes in a way that follows our [candidate ranking and proportional representation] rules. The fourth is how do we project all of those [new features and results] out into the world. Some vendors play in one or two of those buckets.”

Brennan told the RBC that the state party has no credible way to estimate how many people would actually use the remote voting option, even though it had consulted with a range of experts. The past estimates have suggested one-quarter or more of 2020 caucus participants might vote remotely.

Brennan and Geiken turned to the vote-counting process and said that the state party decided that it would be simpler to create four new statewide precincts for telephone voters—one for each of Iowa’s U.S. House districts—where the virtual votes would be separately tallied, and then added to the statewide results from the precinct caucuses to determine the night’s winner: the candidate with the most delegates awarded to the process’s next stage. The virtual bloc would be allocating 10 percent of the delegates statewide.

The challenge before the Iowa party was to create a remote voting process that closely copied what occurs in the physical caucuses, the Iowa officials said. The solution is to have a version of what was called a ranked-choice ballot, where telephone voters will list their top five candidates. Geiken said that somewhere among the voter’s top five choices was likely to be one candidate who was viable and crossed the 15 percent elimination threshold.

Geiken noted that the party was “working with vendors to see if it’s possible to send voters back an email receipt” of their choices, which one RBC member, David McDonald of Washington state, questioned as possibly not satisfying the Rules Committee’s 2020 requirement for a paper-based vote count audit trail—for possible recounts. Geiken and Brennan also explained that participants at the 1,677 caucus sites would fill out a paper form—not a ballot—that listed their first and final presidential choices, which would comprise a paper record of the precinct voting.

Security and Ranked-Choice Voting

The most vocal RBC members raised concerns about the intricacies of this overall process—such as what were the plans for collecting all of those presidential preference cards from the 1,677 precincts in a manner where none would be lost or suddenly appear in a close or contested vote. But, overall, the two main areas of concern were the virtual system’s security and its ranked-choice voting.

On the cyber-security front, Virginia’s Abraham was not the only RBC member to ask about backup plans, in case something forced the Iowa party to shut down the virtual voting process.

“You get up to the last day, when you have a virtual and actual [precinct caucuses] happening at the same time—what code red activities do you have in place if everything falls apart?” asked Yvette Lewis of Maryland. “What do you have in case the system breaks down, or something goes screwy? I think you need a code red contingency in case things fall apart on the last day.”

“We are spending a lot of time talking about the virtual caucuses, but it is my belief that the majority of Iowans will participate in the caucuses like they always have,” replied Brennan. “It is a smaller universe of people that will participate in the virtual caucuses.”

“I get that,” Lewis countered. “But I think we are spending so much time on it because it is new and we need to work out all of the bugs in it now… All of the other parts you have done before… [are] like walking in your sleep. This isn’t. It is something that can skew the numbers. We need to flesh this out.”

Lewis and Abraham were not alone in expressing big-picture reservations as more details emerged about operating a new system of remote voting and allocating presidential convention delegates.

“We are being asked to certify that the party has the technical ability, the skill, the expertise, the finances, and all these security issues will be in place, and nobody will be disenfranchised, and whether there’s a red plan,” said RBC member McDonald after the previous exchange. “I am reluctant to give a carte blanche out of here and say, ‘Yeah, it’s all okay, trust it.’”

These concerns surprised Iowa officials. They said that they expected to win full RBC approval, which they say they needed before signing any contracts with vendors who will build and customize the actual voting system. They also noted the DNC’s 2020 rules never specified creating a backup system.

There were also more customer-service oriented questions about whether voters using the telephone system for the first time could become confused by the volume of the choices and ranking them.

“I’m not sure how it would really work,” said Frank Leone, an RBC member from Virginia. “Currently, there are 23 candidates. So how do you—does the [pre-recorded telephone] vote listing list all 23 candidates, and then you put in the number 12 or something, and then you do this five different times, and somehow it all gets put together at a statewide level, and then re-sorted five different times to come up with results? It seems to… create a great deal of confusion and effort, certainly on your part and on the part of the voter, who is trying to call in and negotiate somehow.”

“From my perspective as a prospective voter, how do you plan to translate all of this to the public?” RBC Co-Chair Lorraine Miller of Texas asked immediately after Leone’s question and remarks. “Give us a little synopsis at the end of the presentation.”

Geiken responded that the party’s messaging would be simple.

“It’s really less about what are the changes in the process and more so from a perspective of ‘how can I participate in the caucus?’ That is a relatively easy answer,” he said. “Every Iowa Democrat who wants to caucus should caucus. If you want to caucus on February 3 and you are available and able to caucus in person, you show up to your caucus site.”

“If you can’t go on February 3 and want to participate virtually, here’s how you do that. You register with us somewhere between January 6 and January 17,” he continued. “At the point of registration, you get the instructions, access code, some other security questions. You call into that caucus session… rank candidates, then [answer] party business questions… That is [how] the simplicity of the process for the Iowa caucus goes.”

The public education would emphasize the process’s positives, not negative “what-if” scenarios, Geiken said.

“We don’t have plans to talk into the weeds, all of the scenarios,” he said. “If you are participating virtually and your phone dies halfway through, what do you do? Well, some people may want to know that. So we will have that on our website—all of what we will call ‘caucus what-ifs—frequently asked questions.’ And then from there be aggressive with pushing this information out with our partners [constituencies, campaigns], including the media.”

As the review neared the two-hour mark, it occurred to the more outspoken RBC members—a few out of two-dozen in the room—that the panel did not have sufficient explanations, or possibly the technical expertise, to assess some key unanswered concerns.

“We are not really doing the job that we have been asked to do,” said McDonald, referring to vetting the virtual voting. “We need a complete plan. Our [DNC] security people need to have seen the vendors, to make sure that they are actually able to comply with the security. Unless somebody says that can be done by [the late] July [RBC meeting], I’d suggest August, at least.”

At this point, the RBC co-chairs, Lorraine Miller, and James Roosevelt III of Massachusetts, noted that the DNC technical staff had recommended “a conditional compliance” for Iowa and began the formal process to proceed to committee endorsement vote.

“We can agree that the plan meets the spirit of the DNC rules, but has open questions that need to be resolved,” said Roosevelt. “Technical questions can be addressed by staff. Questions that are more than just technical are always brought to the co-chairs, and then we decide if it needs to go back to the committee. By conditional compliance, we endorse the framework of the plan but [are] not giving final approval to its implementation.”

“My concerns are not just technical,” interjected McDonald, who then cited the ranked-choice voting method for telephone voters, and only allocating that bloc 10 percent of the overall delegates. “Whether allocating those results only to a congressional district, as opposed to back to a precinct where the person was supposed to vote, is fair. And I do not want, by this vote of conditional compliance, to say that those things comply.”

Roosevelt agreed with McDonald, and also acknowledged that the Iowa party officials looked disappointed. “I can maybe sense by the look on your faces that you’re saying, ‘but what else?’ But, between now and then, we will ask you to see what else,” he said. “And then we’ll see… can we vote for compliance?”

“My only suggestion, for any number of reasons, [is] we need to be done with the process in July,” Brennan replied. “Whatever those issues are, we need to have them outlined for us within the next week. We can address all of those issues… if we take it to August, we’re too late.”

“I think what we’ve done today is you’ve brought forth a great deal of information, and we have satisfied some concerns—and some that are not fully satisfied,” Roosevelt said. “We know this is a big deal. That’s why we spent so much time today… We will have what we are dealing with at the July meeting.”

After that exchange, the Rules Committee conditionally approved Iowa’s plans. The biggest issues were if the proposed virtual voting system elements would be secure enough for the DNC’s security team. And would the allocation of delegates after the telephone-based ranked-choice voting have to be changed—and with it the underlying technology—so virtual votes are added into precinct results? (Allocating virtual votes locally is Nevada’s approach.)

“I don’t know that we are set back. We will have to see what the staff review comes back with next,” said Geiken afterward. “If the committee says we have to inject it [virtual voting results] into the precinct level, that significantly changes our timeline… That would significantly change the relationship with our vendor and the product we are asking for.”

“I think they [the RBC] will find that when they talk to Nevada and any other state, I think they will find that we are not any farther behind; in fact, we are farther ahead of the game in thinking of the security concerns, the actual technological solutions that are needed, than any other state right now,” Geiken said. “For all of the members, this is the first time looking at any of this… That’s not a slight on any other state. I think Nevada is quite far—they have gone down the rabbit hole as we have on this. We were, in fact, the test case in today’s conversation.”

(Editor’s note: This is the first report in a series on new technologies and voting procedures that might be used in the 2020 presidential election’s opening contests. The next report will look at Nevada’s proposed virtual caucus voting system.)

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

IMAGE: A caucus worker holds up a sign to direct voters to their respective table during Nevada Republican presidential caucus at Western High School in Las Vegas, Nevada February 23, 2016. REUTERS/David Becker