How much do Nevada voters want to skip having to caucus this Saturday? Some of them have waited in line for 3 hours to vote early. The early voting highlighted one of the lingering concerns for Saturday's main events. While voters are using marked paper ballots in the early voting, some locations had problems with the iPad system the party is using for both checking in voters and tallying votes, including not enough volunteers to get it done.
The lack of volunteers assisting the 18,538 early voters this weekend is just the beginning of problems campaigns are warning of ahead of Saturday. To be clear, these campaign representatives who talked to The Washington Post are doing so anonymously and might have interest in sowing distrust of the system just in case their candidate does poorly in the caucus. At the same time, a common theme emerges from the campaigns and volunteers—a lack of transparency on how it’s supposed to work.
Campaign representatives say that the party hasn't provided "even a basic explanation of how key parts of the process will work." The volunteers in early voting have reported problems with the technology and voting experts remain concerned about the security of the whole thing, or at least as much of it as they've been able to discern what information the party has thus far provided.
The party was initially going to use the same Shadow, Inc. app used in the Iowa caucus fiasco, but had to scrap those plans fast. Between Iowa and today, they've changed their voting procedures twice. A few days after the Iowa caucus, the Nevada party said it wasn't going to use any apps at all, then on February 8 notified campaigns it would be using the iPad "tool" which consists of Google forms and a caucus calculator. The test run of the system Saturday didn't assuage concerns as some sites ended up reverting to paper.
The Post reports one site volunteer being concerned enough to go public. Seth Morrison has complained about confusing information given to volunteers and a lack of hands-on training for the calculator. He also said that it may "have raised questions about different scenarios they might encounter, like whether an early vote with no viable candidates should be thrown out. Nobody seems to know, he said."
Early voters were supposed to mark their first choice on their ballots, then to select "uncommitted" for their second and third choices. Ballots with only one candidate selected are supposed to be thrown out, and voters are supposed to be instructed as such. That's the early voting approximation of an in-person caucus, but means that people who have only one choice aren't going to get to have their vote count. It's reinforcing many of the problems with representation that arise from having caucuses in the first place.
The campaigns are particularly concerned that as they raise these problems, they are being met with a "brick wall" from the DNC and confusion and a lack of transparency from the state party. All of which is shaping up to be another long and confusing caucus day that won't reflect well on anybody.