The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: telephone voting
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.

The Perils Of A Vote-By-Phone Scheme In 2020

The Perils Of A Vote-By-Phone Scheme In 2020

Reprinted with permission fromAlternet

Many of the Democratic Party’s 25 presidential candidates are having a tough time standing out and meeting the DNC’s rules for qualifying for the early televised debates. When 2020’s caucus and primary voting starts in February, most of the contenders—but not former Vice President Joe Biden—will face a similar predicament. They will be buried in the ballots because the candidates’ names will be alphabetized in the new voting systems being deployed in key early contests.

According to ballot experts, numerous academic studies have found that being placed at the top of the ballot order can add one-to-three percentage points to a candidate’s totals. In the current field, Biden will be the second name heard, while Bernie Sanders will be 20th and Elizabeth Warren will be 23rd.

“We know that order effects are real,” said Whitney Quesenbery, co-director of the Center for Civic Design, which studies ballot design and usability issues facing voters. “Political science suggests that there is a 1 percent to 3 percent disadvantage to being lower in the list. The thing I do not see in the literature is any test that looks at the degree to which someone cares—the strength of intent” to vote for a specific candidate.

While presidential contests tend to have the most motivated voters, three of the four opening Democratic states will be using new balloting and voting systems which, in addition to being unfamiliar to voters, will list the candidates in alphabetical order.

In Iowa and Nevada, 2020’s first and third contests, state party officials estimate that tens of thousands of people will vote early or virtually. For the first time, these voters will use telephone keypads to punch in, or speak, a number corresponding to their presidential choices after hearing instructions listing and numbering all of the candidates. (They’ll first hear welcome messages and be asked if they want other roles helping the party.)

These “virtual voters” are to rank their presidential choices, one at a time, in successive rounds after hearing a recording where all of the names will be recited. Iowa wants its virtual voters to rank their top five choices. Nevada yet hasn’t decided on its number.

In the current field, Biden—who is leading in RealClearPolitics’ national average of polls on July 16 with 27.8 percent support—would be number 2 in the alphabetized phone-voting order. Sanders, who is tied with Warren, with 15.0 percent support, would be the 20th candidate to have their name read. Warren would be the 23rd. If it takes five seconds or so to recite each candidate’s name and number, the virtual voters would have to listen for about two minutes before hearing her name—after opening messages.

Other leading candidates are stuck in the middle. Kamala Harris, with 13.4 percent, would be the 12th name read. Michael Bennet, now polling at 0.6 percent, would be first. Andrew Yang, who has jumped ahead of Bennet with 1.6 percent, would be the last name read. Thus, in a current field where many candidates are within a point or two of each other, the ballot order is another factor to contend with in 2020’s early-voting states.

“I think it’s a little crazy that the Democrats are doing this,” Quesenbery said, referring to the introduction of telephone voting and wondering what field tests were planned before 2020’s caucuses. “If you are running as a candidate, I’d be wanting to have [a] sample of that [phone script]. I would be wanting to know what mistakes people might make, and I would be doing all of my campaign work around solving that.”

However, it’s not just telephone voting in Iowa and Nevada where the ballot order could nudge candidates up or down in the results of the 2020 nominating contests.

In New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s second contest and first primary, the ballot order will be scrambled—not alphabetical. Thus, voters backing lower-listed contenders will have to look a little harder to find their choice, Quesenbery said.

In South Carolina, the fourth contest, the state will be using a new touch-screen voting system listing candidates alphabetically. Its voters won’t find Warren until they reach the second page on their touch screens, Chris Whitmire, South Carolina State Election Commission public information director, said, noting their new system’s screen lists up to 16 candidates.

Academic research confirms that being listed at the top of a ballot boosts votes for any candidate—and more so in primaries than during November’s general elections.

“In primaries… we show that being listed first benefits everyone,” Daniel E. Ho and Kosuke Imai wrote in Public Opinion Quarterly in 2008. “Major party candidates generally gain one to three percentage points, while minor party candidates may double their vote shares. In all elections, the largest effects are for nonpartisan races, where candidates in first position gain three percentage points.”

Candidate order is one of several ballot issues that can affect a candidate’s vote. While some recent studies have shown that “the advantage of the first position exceeded the winner’s margin” in a handful of 2016 local races, poorly designed ballots—such as Broward County in Florida placing the 2018 U.S. Senate race on one ballot card page with no other contest—can lead to voters unintentionally skipping the race.

A confusing or poorly designed ballot with lots of candidates can also lead sizable numbers of voters to make mistakes and have their votes disqualified. In California’s 2016 U.S. Senate race, where there were 34 candidates, more than half of the state’s counties listed the candidates in two columns. That layout prompted “over-votes” by 3.6 percent of voters, meaning they voted more than once and their vote didn’t count.

Quesenbery was less concerned about South Carolina’s new touch-screen system than with the new telephone systems in Iowa and Nevada. South Carolina voters were used to voting on touch screens, she said, even if they were not very good. (Its legacy voting machines were being replaced for a range of age, security, performance and auditing concerns.) The same would hold true for other states deploying new touch-screen systems, she said.

“We have all gotten used to working on a screen and to be able to move through things,” Quesenbery said. “The other thing is that if you have a long list [of candidates], an alphabetical list makes some sense, because if you know you want to vote for Elizabeth Warren, and you can read English, you know where she’s going to be on the list.”

Chris Hayler, a partner with Stones’ Phones, the vendor creating the telephone-voting interface for Iowa and Nevada, said that his firm was programming options for voters to make some shortcuts in the virtual caucus process.

“We will enable coding so if you have voted as many preferences as you have, then you can basically stop and finish,” he said. “If you just wanted to caucus only for Bernie and nobody else, you could push their number. And as you start to begin the second round of your presidential preference voting, it would say, ‘This is your second round… if you don’t want to enter a preference or you’re done at any time, you can push or say 99, or whatever the number we program, so you can opt out.’”

Hayler estimated that it would take “five to ten minutes” for each virtual voter in 2020.

“It’s going to be read off alphabetically each time. So, ‘for Biden, press one,’ and it goes on like that, in the same number order each time,” he said. “Some folks will start to pick up on what their preferences are and they can enter their preference in advance of it. So, if in the second preference, they want to go with Elizabeth Warren, and then wrote down that she is number 22, or whatever it is, then they can just push in or say ‘22.’ And after each time they indicate a preference, we will read back that preference and ask them to confirm it, just to make sure that it is right.”

If people struggled with the telephone system, they could call a help-desk number and would be directed to Iowa or Nevada state party offices, he said.

There was no doubt that the ballot order could help or hurt certain contenders in 2020’s early contests, Quesenbery said. But such order effects occur when the voting system is working properly and easy to use, she said, raising her other expertise, usability issues. It was essential that Iowa and Nevada tested their virtual systems and planned for well-staffed help desks to deal with the ‘customer service’ problems that likely will arise.

“Errors that are big enough to have an impact on an election show up pretty easily,” she said, adding that relatively small-scale tests would reveal problems, especially for “people with low literacy, people who are not digitally savvy, [and] people who don’t speak English very well.” Otherwise, “it is like jumping off of a diving board and hoping someone has filled the pool.”

But even if deploying virtual voting in Iowa and Nevada, and new touch screens in South Carolina, work without any user issues, the large pool of Democratic hopefuls means that some candidates will face advantages or disadvantages due to the ballot order. And they will only have the alphabet to blame.

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.

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

Nevada Democrats Announce Telephone Voting In 2020 Caucus

Nevada Democrats Announce Telephone Voting In 2020 Caucus

On July 8, the Nevada State Democratic Party announced that it would be holding the 2020 presidential election’s “first in the West Virtual Caucus,” where party members can vote early by landline phones and smartphones in the third nominating contest.

“Earlier this year, the Nevada State Democratic Party released a delegate selection plan that laid out our blueprint to make 2020 our most accessible, expansive and transparent caucus yet,” Nevada State Democratic Party Chair William McCurdy II said. “Today, with the announcement of our virtual caucus process, we are one step closer to making our blueprint a reality.”

“Nevada Democrats will have three options on making their voice heard next February,” he continued. “They’ll be able to vote in person at any [predetermined] location in their county on any of the four early voting days between Feb. 15 and 18, vote from home or on the go using their phone by way of our virtual caucus, or attend, in person, on caucus day [Feb. 22], at their assigned precinct.”

Nevada officials, like those in Iowa, whose caucuses launch the 2020 season and will also offer a “virtual caucusing” option, hope that their early and off-site voting will increase participation. But Nevada’s upbeat announcement revealed little of the complexities and unresolved aspects of their proposed overall phone and online system. A key national party committee has not approved its plans, but has raised serious concerns that remain to be addressed.

“Technology, ranked-choice voting, recounts—those are the issues we really have to drill down on, because we are kind of skimming the surface,” said Lorraine Miller, co-chair of the Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) of the Democratic National Committee from Texas, after the panel spent more than an hour questioning Nevada’s plans on June 28 and then granted “conditional” approval.

“Our technology questions are not just security questions. That’s [only] one way to look at technology,” said James Roosevelt III, an RBC co-chair from Massachusetts, echoing Miller and saying the DNC staff would have to more deeply assess Nevada’s proposal before the RBC meets next in late July, when it may vote to approve its plans.

But you would never know of these concerns from listening to the Nevada party (NSDP) officials at their July 8 press conference, nor from reading their press materials, which included a quote from DNC Chair Tom Perez praising the state “for stepping up and taking action to expand access.” Indeed, key parts of Nevada’s envisioned 2020 virtual voting system only exist on paper and have not yet been evaluated for security or usability, but have led to tangible consternation for the DNC Rules Committee.

“It seems to me a pretty gargantuan task,” said Harold Ickes, one of the national party’s top procedural experts and an RBC member from Washington, D.C., after a long exchange over a to-be-created app to be used by volunteer caucus chairs in 1,700-plus precincts. The app will report the early and virtual vote results for that precinct, which will be transmitted from vendors at party headquarters. The chair then will have to enter the room’s in-person voting results in each successive round of voting—all while maintaining order as candidates are eliminated during the presidential caucus.

Following DNC Instructions

Only a few state Democratic parties will hold caucuses in 2020 to choose a nominee. The first contest, in Iowa, and third, in Nevada, are in this group. The state party—not local election officials—will oversee the process. In short, the party will rent the voting system from a mix of private vendors to reach the participation goals in national party directives. These requirements include 2020 rules that allow “the casting of ballots over the Internet” in caucuses for those unable to physically attend, and “a paper record” trail of the votes cast, should a presidential candidate demand a recount.

The Nevada party, like its counterpart in Iowa, has embraced this call for modernizing their caucuses. In recent months, the NSDP has hired staff and aggressively worked with vendors to develop their plans. This overall system includes a registration component; voter contact and vetting when they log in; ballot interfaces for voters using landline telephones or smartphones to make their choices; the recording, transmitting, tabulating and encrypting of the presidential votes—where candidates are ranked but votes for disqualified candidates won’t count; and where remote votes are blended in with the rounds of live voting at about 1,700 local caucuses. And there’s to be a paper record of votes in case of a recount.

It is not an understatement to suggest that the NSDP, responding to the DNC’s 2020 Delegate Selection Rules, is trying to stand up one of the most sophisticated new voting systems in America—and do it in record time. It is also true that as the complexity of this task has crystallized before the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which wrote 2020’s rules—which are goals and procedures, not technicalities for making it work—that a tension has emerged.

The Rules Committee’s most vocal members seem to realize that their caucus states may be taking on too much—even if they are following their 2020 rules. These members are well aware that in today’s political world, any hiccup or error, no matter the cause, will be used to undermine an election’s credibility. Meanwhile, state parties in Iowa, and especially Nevada, are digging in and saying that they and their vendors will successfully modernize and deploy the most modern phone- and internet-based systems.

The friction could be seen in Pittsburgh in late June, when the RBC reviewed the 2020 delegate selection plans from 22 states, but spent most of the time on Iowa and Nevada. Both states’ party officials answered questions about goals and details and won “conditional” approval. But the DNC’s voting procedure experts did not enthusiastically support Nevada’s plan to deploy telephone voting and an online vote-counting infrastructure. Many complex issues had to be resolved before granting formal approval, the co-chairs said. Nonetheless, Nevada’s party held a telephone press conference on July 8, “to announce the first in the West virtual caucus,” enthusiastically promoting their 2020 plans.

“The NV Dems’ virtual caucus allows participants to confirm [their candidate] selections every step of the way,” said Caucus

“There’s a big delta [gap] between this group’s technical expertise as it is related to delegate counting and our technical expertise as it relates to technology,” Yohannes Abraham, an RBC member from Virginia, said before the panel “conditionally” endorsed Nevada’s plan. “If it is in our purview to sign off on both the technology and the actual delegate selection, and obviously those things cannot be disaggregated, I don’t think we can do that in good conscience prior to the July meeting without a real in-depth briefing.”

Back in their vote-counting wheelhouse, the RBC’s most vocal members asked how volunteers who serve as the caucus chairs and their assistants in the 1,700-plus precinct caucuses would manage possibly unruly rooms after announcing results from the early and virtual voting—voters not physically present—and then do the vote-count math as the candidate elimination rounds continue.

The virtual results, from four days of early voting and two other days of early phone voting, would be sent by the party vendors and appear on the app given to each precinct chair. These votes, could, conceivably, alter the outcome in the room, where contenders with less than 15 percent of the vote are eliminated from future rounds. The chairs were also to use a calculator on the app to record and determine the results during every ensuing round, where only the still-viable candidate votes (from early and virtual ballots) had to be processed along with the votes inside the caucus rooms.

“That’s a lot of information for the precinct chairman,” said Ickes, one of the DNC’s top procedural experts and an RBC member from Washington, D.C., launching a detailed discussion.

Shelby Wiltz on the press call. “It allows all voters the ability to participate using a landline, a cell phone, or the ability to dial in using Skype or Google Hangouts.”

Nevada and the Rules Committee

At late June’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, some of the most seasoned and vocal members were skeptical about Nevada’s proposed virtual system and vote-counting procedures. Some said that they could not evaluate cyber-security issues, saying the DNC technology and security staff would have to assist them, and called for “a real in-depth” briefing before revisiting Nevada’s proposal.

“There’s a big delta [gap] between this group’s technical expertise as it is related to delegate counting and our technical expertise as it relates to technology,” Yohannes Abraham, an RBC member from Virginia, said before the panel “conditionally” endorsed Nevada’s plan. “If it is in our purview to sign off on both the technology and the actual delegate selection, and obviously those things cannot be disaggregated, I don’t think we can do that in good conscience prior to the July meeting without a real in-depth briefing.”

Back in their vote-counting wheelhouse, the RBC’s most vocal members asked how volunteers who serve as the caucus chairs and their assistants in the 1,700-plus precinct caucuses would manage possibly unruly rooms after announcing results from the early and virtual voting—voters not physically present—and then do the vote-count math as the candidate elimination rounds continue.

The virtual results, from four days of early voting and two other days of early phone voting, would be sent by the party vendors and appear on the app given to each precinct chair. These votes, could, conceivably, alter the outcome in the room, where contenders with less than 15 percent of the vote are eliminated from future rounds. The chairs were also to use a calculator on the app to record and determine the results during every ensuing round, where only the still-viable candidate votes (from early and virtual ballots) had to be processed along with the votes inside the caucus rooms.

“That’s a lot of information for the precinct chairman,” said Ickes, one of the DNC’s top procedural experts and an RBC member from Washington, D.C., launching a detailed discussion.

“It is,” replied Wiltz. “But we really look forward to the process.”

“But you haven’t developed that system of integrating all this information so the precinct chair can handle it efficiently and clearly, yet?” Ickes said, referring to what Wiltz later described as “a secure calculation tool, a caucus app and calculator to allow precinct captains to do the math at their precincts on caucus day.”

“No, not yet,” Wiltz replied, “but we’ve been spending the last two months working closely to review proposals from vendors that are going to assist us with that task.”

The exchange was met by silence. Minutes before, questioning by Ickes revealed that the state party had not yet developed the voter registration and vetting system that it said would be used so that a voter could not vote twice—but also could participate in precinct caucuses if they signed up to vote virtually but did not vote that way. Wiltz said that system “does not yet exist,” but would be “similar to caucus tracking systems” the party used in 2016.

These disclosures raised concerns, which, in some cases, could not be addressed because there was not enough available information. Specifically, it’s hard to evaluate an app or other parts of a wider voting system, when those elements exist on paper or were last used by another client but are awaiting customization for 2020.

Jeff Berman, an RBC member from Washington, D.C., followed the exchange between Ickes and Wiltz by asking how local precincts would be staffed “to handle this more complicated calculation,” referring to the vote-counting elements and stages.

Wiltz replied that “precinct captains and site leads” would receive extensive training, and the highest-profile caucus sites would have NSDP staff present. The party would also set up a hotline “to assist with any issues” and “deploy additional volunteers as necessary to help put out any fires,” she said.

Berman replied, “I’ll just say in 2016 I observed a caucus in Iowa and it was, for some reason, a location where nobody was the chair of—so basically there were about 100 people in the room and [they were] equally divided between the two main candidates, trying to figure out what to do. And that was without electronic information coming in that somebody was supposed to master.”

At that point, Artie Blanco, Nevada’s Rules Committee member, stepped in to stop the escalating doubts and express her confidence that the state party and its caucus plan would succeed—increasing participation and capably managing the process.

“We have been working on what this system will look like,” said Blanco. “Like Shelby has mentioned, we have been working lockstep with the DNC technology department; to ensure that the vendors that we are reviewing—that we are seriously in consideration with—and have already discussed the potential technology that will be used on that day. I know you have questions, but it will result—we feel very confident that it will result in a system that will work for our volunteer precinct chairs.”

“I don’t doubt your commitment, and the commitment of your colleagues, but I wonder how the person who is the precinct chair, or managing [the caucus], handles the figuring out of the threshold,” replied Ickes, referring to the count math that disqualifies candidates.

“Because that [voting] is going to be coming in from three different sources: One, the people who walk in; two, the people who vote early; three, the people who voted virtually. And the latter two, as I understand it, are going in ranked order,” he said. “So here you’ve got a precinct chairman, managing the people in there, and sometimes it can get quite boisterous, and then having to figure out the threshold by integrating all of this information. In theory, can it be done? The answer is yes. …[A]nd the system, according to you, has not even been designed yet. It seems to me a pretty gargantuan task to do.”

Wiltz replied that she understood Ickes’ concerns, but said Nevada was responding to “the requirements that the DNC has given to all states, and requirements that we are excited about taking on.”

She continued, “One of those requirements is to provide people with an option to participate virtually or absentee. One of those requirements is to allow an early vote process. In order to do that, we have to make a decision about how… we count the votes of people who participate in those processes. This is something that any [caucus] state like us would grapple with. We have the option to give those folks their own precinct. We also have the option to have those votes counted in-person at their precinct. We have obviously chosen the latter.”

As the discussion continued, other RBC members had questions about slight variations in the candidate ranking process to be used by the early and virtual voters, compared to those in caucus rooms. Wiltz told everyone not to worry, as a vendor would do all the vote-counting math, including on the app given to the caucus chairs.

“Harold, the math is not going to be dependent on the precinct chair,” she said, addressing Ickes. “That is, the technology that is being built, the math will be set in a system that will be part of our [overall] technology. So that’s the point to your question.”

Other Issues and Questions

As the review continued, RBC members raised still other concerns. One question was whether Nevada’s plan to add early and virtual votes into the results in about 1,700 local precincts was preferable to the approach taken by Iowa. It was creating four new precincts across the entire state, where early and remote votes would be counted separately and added into statewide caucus totals. During Iowa’s presentation, its officials said they made that choice to simplify the process, even though it was a departure from caucus tradition.

It also emerged that NSDP officials had not yet decided how many candidates these voters were to rank. In Iowa, the virtual voters are to rank five top choices. Iowa officials said that ranking five of the choices was likely to include at least one viable candidate from that voter’s precinct caucus—if they chose to attend that event.

The volume of candidates to be ranked would affect the process’s complexity—starting with the time required by older voters using phone keypads to repeatedly enter their choices after hearing a list of the candidates read out (after logging into the phone system). There are currently two-dozen presidential candidates.

“We are working with our vendors to understand what the threshold is for the number of choices or preferences that we need to provide someone who votes early or virtually,” Wiltz said. “We have not yet set that number.”

There were still other questions. Longtime RBC member Donna Brazile of Washington, D.C., who stepped in as DNC chairwoman in 2016 and managed Al Gore’s presidential campaign, asked why the registration deadline for early voting was November 30, 2019, when the state government’s registration deadline was in early February—and the NSDP would allow same-day registration for early voters and in-person caucus participants. Wiltz replied that the early deadline was needed to create voter rolls ensuring that nobody could vote in more than one setting.

“The security issue I am worried about comes up not when somebody tries to vote twice,” said David McDonald, an RBC member from Washington. “It’s when the opposition campaign shows up and tries to vote in your name, and then you go to your caucus and you’ve been disqualified by a security procedure.”

McDonald also asked about potential “Wi-Fi issues” in precincts that could interfere with the use of an app by the chair. During Iowa’s presentation, he asked how the electronic voting would produce a paper trail of all of the votes, but that issue did not surface in discussing Nevada’s proposal.

Both Iowa and Nevada said they would be introducing presidential preference cards in their precinct caucuses, where voters would list their first and final choices, as a way of documenting the votes. During Iowa’s review, McDonald expressed concerns about the collection and custody of those cards, which would have to be turned in from roughly 1,700 caucus sites in each state.

Iowa and Nevada party officials also said that they were talking to vendors about emailing a ballot summary receipt to virtual voters, which Wiltz called a “voter verified paper record” in her opening remarks summarizing their proposed system. RBC members did not ask about that receipt.

Members of the DNC’s technology and security staff sat behind the RBC members and took notes, but wouldn’t comment to the press about how they conducted their reviews that lead to making recommendations that all of the state’s 2020 plans before the panel be conditionally approved—including Nevada’s plan, which has central elements that do not yet exist.

Pressing Ahead

As the Nevada review continued, state party officials stressed they were planning to undertake unprecedented levels of training for the caucus volunteers and the party’s partners—such as the 58,000-member Culinary Workers Union Local 226. In addition to online training, and new training materials in several Asian languages, Wiltz said there would be “150 training sessions between now and February 22.”

“Everything we are doing in 2020 is more aggressive,” she said. “And it’s bigger. And it also ensures that we are meeting the requirements of the DNC and that we are committing ourselves to the values that we have as a party—which is to expand the process for people that otherwise would not be able to participate.”

After an hour, Artie Blanco, the lone RBC member from Nevada, made the formal motion to conditionally approve the state’s 2020 plan. The RBC gave its assent, but not before members voiced concern, including Co-Chair James Roosevelt III, who looked to the panel’s next meeting and said, “We’ve got a lot of stuff, for lack of a better word, that we probably should get ironed out.”

“It just strikes me that we are not going to find resolution on a lot of these things without a more detailed briefing from our technology staff at the DNC,” Virginia’s Abraham added.

“We are thinking along the same lines,” replied Co-Chair Lorraine Miller, after comparing her notes with Roosevelt.

The Rules and Bylaws Committee will next meet in late July and will consider more details from the Nevada State Democratic Party and the DNC technology and security staff. If satisfied, it may then formally approve both Nevada’s and Iowa’s virtual voting plans.

But in the meantime, Nevada party officials have begun telling the press and public to expect they can vote to nominate a presidential candidate using their landline phone or smartphone.

“Our virtual caucus will offer Nevada Democrats the opportunity to participate in the caucus from home, whether it be those overseas serving in our military, those homebound due to a disability or illness, or any Democrat unable to attend on caucus day,” said NSDP Chair William McCurdy II on July 8, at the beginning of the press conference announcing virtual voting.

 

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