Will Nevada become another Iowa caucus debacle?

Democratic campaigns and party activists in Nevada are expressing concern over the possibility of another caucus meltdown similar to what occurred in Iowa, according to multiple reports.

As early voting began this week, multiple 2020 campaigns told The Washington Post that they had still not received any information from the Nevada State Democratic Party (NSDP) about how key parts of the voting process would work.

The NSDP was forced to quickly overhaul their caucus process after the app they originally commissioned from Shadow Inc. had a botched rollout when used in Iowa earlier this month.

Nevada Democratic officials vowed at the time to not allow their caucus to be impacted the same way Iowa was.

“NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22nd. We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus,” state party chair William McCurdy II said in a statement.

“We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems, and are currently evaluating the best path forward.”

The problem, according to some Democratic campaign aides, is that the party is not being transparent and does not appear to know what they’re doing.

“It feels like the [state party is] making it up as they go along,” one campaign aide told the paper on the condition of anonymity, “That’s not how we need to be running an election.”

“If the party had this process well defined and had confidence in it, I think that we’d know a lot more about it,” another campaign aide told the outlet.

The NSDP is now using a Google Forms web application which they pre-installed on iPads for caucus administrators to use.

Volunteers worry that they had not received proper training on how to use the Google program, and questions to party leaders have gone unanswered.

One volunteer told Politico that state party officials neglected to even mention the Google form during a training session last week. The iPads were not even discussed until halfway through the presentation, when a volunteer asked how early vote totals would be compiled.

The state party representative told attendees not to worry, the iPads would do the math for them.

“The training showed us graphs that could’ve been an Excel spreadsheet. There was no training on the tool because they’re still working on it,” Seth Morrison, a site lead for multiple precincts in Nevada, told CNN on Friday, just one day before early voting began.

Another volunteer who holds a senior position at one of the caucus sites told the outlet that they had no hands-on training with the iPads before Saturday, the first day of early voting in the caucus state.

That volunteer said that as a result, the first few hours of voting were “disastrous.”

Alana Mounce, the NSDP’s executive director, described Google’s program as “user-friendly” in a memo released last Thursday, but added that 3,000 volunteers would undergo a “robust training program” to prepare.

A spokesperson for the Nevada Democrats could not immediately be reached by The Post for comment.

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