Former Senate Majority Leader and proud Nevadan Harry Reid makes a strong case for Nevada supplanting Iowa as the first nominating contest in the nation in a new Vice interview. "Why? Because we're a state that's heavily diverse. […] It's really a state that represents what the country is all about. So I think that Iowa really was an embarrassment to everybody." But Nevada could be an embarrassment in its own right if the state party doesn't make the most of the 10 days it has in which to secure its procedures and systems for the February 22 caucus.
Election experts and party volunteers have many concerns. As of yet, the volunteers who will be running the caucus sites have not had hands-on training with new tools they'll be using. The state immediately decided scrapped plans to use the Shadow Inc. apps that Iowa used, but the new tool they plan to use on iPads that will be deployed to caucus sites hasn't been tested by the volunteers. Party officials are being tight-lipped and optimistic, even though the timeline for getting the job done is quickly shrinking. “We’ll train our volunteers as soon as the process is rolled out,” Megan Forgey, a state party spokeswoman told AP Tuesday night. "I think our confidence level is the same—still high." That's not convincing elections experts.
The use of the iPads themselves is raising security red flags, since they will probably be connected to the internet. They could thus be hackable and the wireless networks they're operating on could also be overwhelmed by outside hackers."It's terrifying that this is happening 11 days before the caucus," Gregory Miller, chief operating officer of the OSET Institute, a nonprofit election technology organization, told the Washington Post's Joseph Marks. "This all should have been baked in several months ago."
The plan as of now is to use spreadsheets with county-specific PDFs of voter rolls loaded on to the iPads using the Books app. Volunteers will check in early voters using the iPads, and will record who voted early using a Google form. That's how the early vote is meant to happen, but thus far the state Democrats hasn't answered the Post's questions about how long the iPads will be connected to the internet, or what tool they'll be using to reconcile the early voting with the actual in-person caucus voting. That means outside experts can't weigh in on potential cubs and pitfalls, and the lack of transparency can feed trollish efforts to spread disinformation.
One good point, experts say, is that they will use Google Forms rather than an unknown, untested custom-built tool "Google dedicates enormous resources to keep their core infrastructure secure," Chad Loder, founder of the cybersecurity training company Habitu8, told Marks. "They have experience in protecting their systems and applications from nation states. Sometimes, simpler is better." So there's that.