The Nevada Democratic Party is bound and determined to make sure its caucuses on Saturday won’t be a disaster, according to party communications director Molly Forgey.
Most important: keep Tom Perez out of it.
Won’t be another Iowa because they’ll figure out a whole new way to fuck things up.
Oh, well that’s a relief then. Except… whoops… the Nevada DNC has bought every precinct an iPad to run a Google spreadsheet thing to tally results, with a phone backup, and nobody has used this system before. Where have I heard that before?
Did they issue a 12-year-old grandkid to each precinct so that the geriatric folk who usually run these have on-site tech support?..
This is what happens when you have young and enthusiastic idiots with great solutions… They forget to design a system that works for the end-users…
“Forgey told CNN anchor Kate Bolduan on Tuesday that Nevada precinct captains have been undergoing robust training every day until Saturday, and that the party is certain the caucuses will go off without a hitch.”
Paging the TPM copy editor…
If the software these people are being trained to use hasn’t been stress-tested, all that robust training could be for naught.
Is there a paper backup?
THIS. I don’t give a rat’s ass how good your electronic score keeping is - if you don’t have a solid paper ballot backup, you’re working without a net.
I know Nevada was required to offer more opportunities for voting, but how does this process work as a “caucus” when they have early voting? This antiquated caucus stuff is increasingly ridiculous.
As for a verifiable paper trail — yes, please. I hate that here in Houston we have to go through yet another round of elections using crap electronic machines with zero paper trail and absolutely no way to do an effective audit. You go through the whole process, hit “cast ballot,” and then can only hope your votes were recorded correctly and won’t be screwed with.
I have no doubt the GOP ratfornicators (and their Russian military advisers) are all set for the denial-of-service attacks necessary – on both the Internet side and the plain, old telephone side – to cripple precinct reporting in Nevada and elsewhere, using lessons learned from Iowa, and honed by experience with each coming Democratic state primary.
No doubt whatsoever.
The results from the early voting period will be pre-loaded on the iPad Google spreadsheet, and automatically added to the Saturday caucus results. Stupid system, they should just go vote-by-mail like every rational state on the West Coast is doing.
There is a paper caucus sheet that will be tallied alongside the Google spreadsheet that’s sent over the Internet, and a person will phone those hand-tallied paper results in to HQ where the numbers will be compared to the iPad numbers.
At least there is a paper trail, but if that doesn’t sound like a disaster waiting to happen, I don’t know what does. I’ll bet we don’t get clear results the first night.
Perez had nothing to do with the Iowa fuck-up/
That was Iowa.
I wish people would understand that the states run their own primary and general elections. There are essentially 50 elections or if you want to count separately the primary and general, there are 100.
I wish that that statement didn’t have to come with qualifiers, like that the states are running it, but operations like the DNC wield an awful lot of control over it (including, in Iowa’s case, things like vetoing stuff like phone-in balloting, having a hand in the app fiasco, etc.).
And we really should have all of the federal elections run by the feds-- one simple standard for everyone.
We’d have to amend the constitution and I don’t trust anyone right now to do that.
Don’t forget that the territories (Guam, Samoa, P.R., etc.) hold primaries / caucuses too.
“When you try and devise an idiot proof system, you find out just how ingenious idiots really are”
And who’s to say which, if any, is correct? Any bets as to how many of these robustly trained people have troubles? It’s really hard for many to add up the same long column of numbers several times and consistently get the correct answer.
The biggest thing is that there should be no pressure to release results on Saturday night…having them Sunday afternoon will make exactly zero difference in which candidate wins the primary. And, the Democrats should announce if any signs of hacking or phone line bombing appear to be going on; that’s not their fault, but the fault of whoever is trying to interfere in our national election system, and it should put pressure on the government to investigate it.
Well, if we had a government that wasn’t going to benefit from hacking and cheating that is…
According to reports I have read, the DNC was closely involved in the Iowa caucuses planning as well as the aftermath of the fiasco.
Every thing is Nevada is always on the up and up.
Just look at casino accounting…