My God, this little tidbit from a story in Politico about the Nevada Caucus is the opposite of hallelujah (not linking to Politico, read it via LGM):
Party officials scrambled to streamline their vote reporting system — settling on Google forms accessible through a saved link on the iPads — after scrapping a pair of apps they’d been planning to use until a similar app caused the fiasco in Iowa two weeks ago.
Again, any process that runs once every four years is really hard to test, and therefore a major technological and human factors challenge. Add to that the fact that it is a new process that someone dreamed up in a couple of weeks, which has to be executed by harried, poorly trained volunteers, and you have a failure waiting to happen. At least they’re using iPads that they control, and Google Forms probably won’t shit the bed on caucus night, but other than that, Titanic II.
Some kind of verified (multiply witnessed) paper record, along with a process to call the results in to a phone bank, and a pre-stamped envelope to send that record to the party via certified/registered/whatever mail, is the right technology for a caucus. But that just avoids the obvious fact that the right solution for picking a candidate of a party is a fucking primary election.
schrodingers_cat
Rs can commit treason but Ds need to be perfect. Got it.
Cam-WA
Let’s see…there’s really no chance that a link saved on the iPads of a lot of people could possibly get out to someone who might want to f**k with the Democratic caucus in NV, right?
Josie
@schrodingers_cat:
Yup. Same as it ever was.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Cam-WA: That raises a host of good questions. I assume that all the iPads are logged into Google accounts, and only those accounts can access the form. What happens if the signon times out? Who has the account credentials? How are those credentials protected, etc.
With a paper reporting instrument you can have a reporting passphrase, unique to each site, on the caucus report sheet, sealed in an envelope, with a taper-evident seal. And you can have the phone number for the phone bank on that piece of paper, too. At a tiny fraction of the cost of an iPad.
Mary G
4chan and 8chan probably have all the access thanks to Putin and hijinks will ensue.
Jeffro
a CLOSED primary election
Jinchi
I don’t understand that. Why come up with a new process? Why not revert to the old one?
And really, the vote in Iowa went fine. The app failed and there were some dirty tricks being played, but nobody is seriously questioning the count and it’s a proportional delegate state, anyway.
The real screwup was promising that CNN would have the results before dinner was cold. Then the media freaked out that they didn’t have an official count until the next afternoon.
An official count which matched pretty well the unofficial count of the night before.
I hope they haven’t remembered how long it usually takes for California to give an official count. Blitzer might declare that they’ve ruined Super Tuesday.
different-church-lady
They’ve been doing caucauses for years now. Why is it suddenly impossible to count the results properly?
Could it possibly be the same kind of thinking that now requires us to own a mobile mini-compiuter just so we can pay for a pack of gum?
esme
I want to emphasize the point that these caucuses are run entirely by volunteers and not often enough for people remember what they did the last time around. I am in charge of the organizing unit in my town in Minnesota for the first time. While I am thrilled that Minnesota adopted a presidential primary after 2016, we still hold caucuses for party-building exercises, including electing delegates to the convention where the local candidates are endorsed. But what I frequently want to scream these days is: I am not a professional! I, and the other officers on the organizing unit, all have full time jobs and family responsibilities and we are doing this in our limited free time. But many people seem to think that we are paid operatives of the party and thus have expectations well beyond what we are able to do. I think BJ has generally been generous to the Iowa caucus volunteers, but still it is worth remembering that most of the people running caucuses are just your average engaged citizen. No special talents or skills – just people trying to make democracy function the best that they can.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady:
BS folks want them to count all kinds of extraneous data so that they can shout rigged primaries when they do poorly.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Jinchi: Yes, and: A phone bank is just as fast as an app if you have enough people to pick up incoming calls. Even if you want an intermediate tally. I really don’t get how an app does anything but add flash to the process
@esme: Absolutely and I think the failure here is all on the designers, not the hard working volunteers who man these caucuses. Before she got sick, my mom was a poll worker at elections. She was in her mid-70s and it took a lot for her to learn about election machines. But they would be using those machines for years, and there was high quality training, so she was able to master it. Completely different situation in Iowa and, apparently, Nevada.
WaterGirl
Someone said on an earlier thread that Klobuchar got up and walked out after she got caught not knowing the name of the President of Mexico. Did I get that right?
Can someone point me to the story of how/why she walked out?
Jinchi
Good point, thanks.
That makes it more vital not to use an app. If the party is relying on volunteer labor, they should to default to the most common and secure forms of communication, pen and paper for tallying and telephones for communication.
Immanentize
@Jeffro: That is your solution, but I read in South Carolina the Republicans are going to mess with the Democratic primary in order to get the Dem.s to back closed primaries. For whatever reason I haven’t taken the time to learn, it is the Democrats in SC who oppose closed primaries.
germy
Major Major Major Major
It’s a good thing they’re not using a company with an active PAC that targets political donations at republicans and controls large swaths of the political-advertising and information-retrieval economy.
@download my app in the app store mistermix: it says in the article the sheet is “accessible from a link saved in the iPads” which to me means that it’s a “private” document with a link that’ll let anybody view and edit it. Which is bad.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: pretty sure it’s exactly that.
WaterGirl
@different-church-lady:
I believe the issue is the changes that Bernie insisted on for 2020 – so the process is new and different.
Mnemosyne
@Jinchi:
You and I rarely agree on anything, but I’m 100 percent in agreement with you on this. The Nevada Democratic Party needs to tell the media to fuck off and they’ll get their numbers after the NDP is sure the numbers are accurate, and not one goddamned second sooner.
jonas
Caucus returns always took time to tabulate and report using antiquated analog methods. The horse-race coverers in the MSM want faster results in return for paying attention to these early small-state caucuses, so the state parties and their media consultants scramble to make them happy and the result is untested, gadget-fueled clusterfucks like Iowa and now, it appears likely, Nevada.
cmorenc
Wouldn’t a ranked-voting form of primary produce similar substantive results as a caucus, in terms of which candidates get delegates and how many? And at much better opportunity for wider, more convenient participation. The one element that would arguably be missing (at least with an Iowa-style caucus) is the face-to-face attempts to persuade caucus attendees initially backing a candidate with numbers below the delegate threshold – to switch their support to another candidate. But that’s an advantage IMHO which is heavily outweighed by the wider participation and ranked voting as a proxy for sorting out folks whose initial candidate choice lacks enough other supporters to be viable.
retiredeng
Having had a career of over 40 years as a programmer I can say that you damn well can’t expect even passable results in just weeks for a system rollout no matter how “simple” it seems on the surface. There are potholes and roadblocks that need to be fixed. Even seasoned professionals can’t get it right the first or even second time let alone a bunch of volunteers. Murphy’s Law is lying in wait at every turn.
Cheryl Rofer
@esme: This is important
The elections will be run by the states, not the party. In many cases (but not all) this means a much more professional operation.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
Sorry, what did you say? I was listening to a podcast while checking Twitter on my pocket computer. ?
Jinchi
I haven’t seen anything like that, but most of the hits I see are from conservative sites like BreitBart and OANN, who are unusually focused on the concerns of our Mexican neighbors in this case. I’m sure Klobuchar left the room after the interview, it’s possible they mistranslated that as “stormed out”.
In any case, the original video is here. She seems pretty embarrassed that she can’t remember his name, but hardly on edge about it. Pete looks pretty pleased with himself, though.
https://www.telemundo.com/noticias/2020/02/14/cual-es-el-nombre-del-presidente-de-mexico-solo-un-precandidato-democrata-de-tres-supo-tmvo9341652
KSinMA
@Jeffro:
Thank you.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Major Major Major Major:
Gawd, I was assuming that they shared a link that had to be accessed via an authorized Google account, just cuz an “anybody” link is so stupid. But maybe you’re right.
VOR
@Immanentize: Minnesota switched from a caucus system to a primary for 2020. It is an open primary, but the record of which party’s primary you voted in will not be anonymous. They are providing the information to the political parties and it may be a public record too.
NotMax
There’s a quip in there somewhere about the powers that be in Nevada acknowledging the futility of gambling. But it’s too soon after waking up (plus pre-coffee) for this aged head to construct it even rudimentarily.
Jinchi
My brain translates that comment as: ‘We’ll screw up in the Nevada way.’
esme
@Jinchi: I agree if you are reporting votes, like in Iowa and in Nevada. In Minnesota, the results are all local party stuff – who gets elected delegate, precinct chair, etc.
We’ve been discussing this in my organizing unit. The state DFL rolled out a new registration system (not an app, a website) and the Iowa debacle (among other things) is making people nervous about using it. But using the new system cuts way down in the amount of data entry you need to do and, I think cuts down the number of data entry errors- again, we are all volunteers. And notice that this is up to each individual unit how they want to run things – I’ve been shocked at the level of local control on how these things work.
Kent
Well, if Nevada botches the job, even slightly, I’m guessing this will be the death knell for caucuses. Primary elections run by the states means at least you have professional elections and every state and locality runs multiple elections per year so they at least know what they are doing. As opposed to using an army of well-meaning volunteers once every 4 years.
The open vs closed primary is an issue, as are the “jungle primaries” in some states like CA and WA. But those are solvable problems.
WaterGirl
@Jinchi: Those video links are in Spanish, which I do not speak. :-(
laura
@Kent: and good riddance if this does put an end to cacuses. Primary votes on paper. How hard do the edge lords of apps think it needs to be and what problem is solved by shiny fancy untested vulnerable systems to determine the will of the voter? Hubris is unhelpful when democracy itself is on the line.
Constance Reader
Note that Nevada was going to do a phone-in caucus in order to increase accessibility, but he DNC shut that down, so they had to come up with an alternative quick. Then they saw what happened in Iowa and rejected an app. This was the result. Just some background because yes, the root cause is the existence of the caucus itself instead of a primary.
L85NJGT
Private party votes are done all the time for stuff like board elections, proxy votes, etc.
I think maybe the issue here isn’t the format or technology, but cash on hand and feeding the media machine are the only factors that any of these campaigns care about, and the other stuff (including the delegate count) is just ephemera.
If the campaigns are all being run in the traditional (Devine/Brazille/Penn etc.) consultant mode, the exhibited results would follow.
zhena gogolia
Sorry, wrong thread.
Miss Bianca
@esme: ’tis true, all of it.
Ruckus
Strange isn’t it, that the simplest and oldest form, paper, is the best. Yes there is a handling issue and a storage issue but the repeatability and proof is in the process, not an add on.
And your second point, that a caucus is wrong is also correct. We have outgrown a system that works fine in a small setting but is unworkable for reasonable representation in a big system. And all of our voting systems are now big systems. Any system with millions of players is a big system, not a small town of 200 inhabitants council meeting. In historical manners we are still a teenaged nation, but we are not a small town, nor even a collection of small towns. Hell, LA county is bigger in population than 42 states and in population only 17 countries are bigger.
James E Powell
What’s amazing is the extent to which avoiding obvious facts characterizes our politics.
L85NJGT
@WaterGirl:
Even the Mexican press refers to him AMLO.
Somebody is trying to move Latino voters off of her with gotcha non-sense.
Schmendrick
This seems like a good place for me to toss in my two cents worth, since I am one of the volunteers who will be helping out this Saturday at the Nevada caucuses (whether or not I am a hard-working volunteer is for someone else to decide.) I wrote up a description of my experiences as an ad hoc volunteer at the first day of early voting in Nevada which was last Saturday. Annie Laurie may be putting it on the front page shortly, but here are a few observations which may apply to some comments above in this thread:
One important point is that four years ago the process in Nevada was a “typical” caucus system. That meant that if you could not or would not go somewhere and stand in a room and publicly declare your choice for a candidate, and then stand around and listen while others (and maybe yourself0 tried to convince other voters to switch to a “viable” candidate, then you did not get to participate in selecting the nominee. In my case, I was out of town (and the country if I remember correctly) so I did not get to influence the Nevada delegation to the convention.
In an effort to involve more people, and accommodate the many shift workers in the entertainment industry whose work schedule makes caucusing a challenge, the party came up with the new, hybrid early “sort-of-ranked-choice” voting/caucus system we are trying to pull-off as I write. Starting two days ago and until tomorrow evening there are dozens of early voting sites where voters can register or update their registration if necessary, and then list 3 to 5 preferences. In a somewhat complicated way these ballots will be used this Saturday as “virtual caucusees” (my term) to determine the number delegates for each candidate at the precinct, county, state level (and national level for delegates from Nevada.)
So they changed the system of participation a lot, to make it easier for many more people to participate. Given this major change (which I think was a step in the right direction) there was bound to be a major change in the process used to tabulate and report the results.
For those who are really curious about the nuts and bolts of the process there is a document on the NVDems.com website which details the rules for delegate selection. Using your favorite search engine on “Nevada State Delegate Selection Plan” should get you to the pdf file, if you like.
The good news, from my perspective, is that according to my training and everything I have witnessed so far in the early vote process, each step of the way includes a paper record of the vote counts. This includes how many people originally voted for each candidate, and how many ended up with each candidate, from the basic precinct level. So if I am acting as a Precinct Chair on Saturday (which is likely unless there are “extra” volunteers), part of my responsibilities will be to record the initial vote counts (both present and early voters) , to record the final vote counts after re-alignment due to non-viability, and to record the allocation of delegates based on these counts. This written record will be signed (signed by representatives of each campaign which is present, and myself) and in some manner transmitted to the state level for aggregating the results.
The purpose of the “app” was to streamline the collection of the data for faster reporting, but I am quite sure that the new scheme with the iPads is also only to expedite the data collection. The “official” results will be based on the collection and collation of the written records from each precinct.
In my case, I believe there may be about a dozen precinct caucuses held in the same building (a large local high school). As a precinct chair I will walk my results down the hall to the caucus site lead, who will package them up with the other precincts there and forward them to the state party.
Since we are in Las Vegas, where the state party is located, I would not be surprised if the site lead delivered these sealed results personally, but I have not looked in to the rules regarding that as of yet. Because I have CDO (it’s like OCD, except the letters are in alphabetical order — as they should be) I will probably look into that before I surrender my written records to my site lead. I also plan to take a picture of the results summary (as can anyone else at the caucus since the results are posted on the wall during the process for all to see.) This means that if we had a functioning system of news reporting that any organization with enough staff to have someone at each caucus site could photograph the reports, send the pictures to a central place and hav someone enter the data and with a spreadsheet pre-programmed with the formulas from the plan mentioned above, could generate the delegate counts as fast as they could transcribe the numbers from precinct reports to the spreadsheet.
If I wasn’t ten years retired (and out of coding shape – so to speak) I probably could have set up the spreadsheet myself in a day or two. Back in the day we had to write code by chiseling holes in clay punchcards, and we liked it! Now get of of my lawn!
Geminid
Virginia has no party registration, therefore its primaries are open, which is an excuse that the Republican conservative faction always uses to advocate for caucuses and conventions. I say excuse because their real reason is that only fanatics like themselves will put in the time. I suspect that the Republicans in SC are lying about their motivation. While they may want an end to open primaries, they want even more to make trouble for the Democrats. Hew Hewitt brags about his absentee VA vote for Sanders, recommends a similar course for Va and SC conservatives.
Martin
Dear everyone:
Adapting the traditional first across the line voting to ranked choice is fairly straightforward, allowing all of those existing voting procedures and protocols which are pretty battle tested to apply directly here, while yielding very nearly the exact same outcome as a caucus, apart from the cinematics and nostalgia of voting as the founders did.
Other things we don’t do the same way as the founders – basically everything. Get over it. They did it this way because they didn’t have communication faster than a horse, calculating machines more advanced than an abacus, and distributed infrastructure more advanced than a barn. We have solved all of those problems 100x over.
m.j.
What’s wrong with land lines and fax machines? It’s tried and proven. It’s near infallible.
Is it just because it’s old?