A18 eZ re the washington post.friday, february 21 , 2020
BY REED ALBERGOTTILAS VEGAS — As early voting
came to a close here Tuesday
evening, a small group of caucus
volunteers waited in the parking
lot o f a dimly lit s trip mall to get a
hands-on demonstration of the
software they would use to tally
votes during Saturday’s Demo-
cratic caucuses.
“This will not be like Iowa,”
one of the volunteers said defi-
antly, referring to the caucus
process in that state roiled by
technological mishaps. She said
she was determined to learn how
the software worked and avert
any embarrassing glitches. She
asked not to be named for fear of
upsetting party officials here.
As Democratic presidential
hopefuls campaign in this fast-
growing Western state, the role
of technology has hung like a
cloud over the process that will
help determine the party’s nomi-
nee. Nevada’s place early on in
the presidential nominating pro-
cess is a point of pride, and
everyone from volunteers to par-
ty officials to ordinary voters is
hoping it doesn’t turn into an
embarrassment.
Nevada’s Democratic Party,
which runs the caucuses, had
planned to use software devel-
oped by the same company be-
hind Iowa’s botched caucus app.
When those p lans were scrapped,
Nevada had less than three
weeks to put a new system in
place, a rush to the finish line
that also contributed to Iowa’s
problems.
The party n ow plans t o distrib-
ute roughly 2,000 iPads
equipped with Cisco Systems se-
curity software designed to allow
corporations to monitor employ-
ee devices. The Apple tablets
have a single icon on the home
page that connects, via cellular
data, to customized Google
Cloud software that volunteers
saw in person for the first time in
Democratic Party offices in the
Las Vegas strip mall.
Te chnology came to the fore-
front of the country’s democratic
process after the Feb. 3 Iowa
caucuses, when an app designed
by a company called Shadow that
was used to calculate vote totals
malfunctioned, delaying results
and opening the door to conspir-
acy theories, voter distrust and
allegations of conflicts of inter-
ests.
Even under the best circum-
stances, the tallying of caucus
results has been known to stump
some volunteers, according to
experts and campaign staffers.
Rather than filling out ballots,
caucus-goers show support for
candidates at in-person gather-
ings, during a multistep process
that can involve changing alle-
giances and dealmaking. Candi-
dates without enough support
are d eemed “nonviable,” a nd sup-
porters of those candidates can
back someone else or form coali-
tions w ith other nonviable candi-
dates. When it’s o ver, the number
of supporters in each group de-
termines how many delegates
are awarded for each candidate.
Since at least 2008, campaign
officials have used technology to
try to better manage the process.
But because of the transient
nature of national politics, the
people who have worked on
building technological tools
come and go, taking their exper-
tise and even their software with
them. Every four years, cam-
paigns and party officials essen-
tially start from scratch, accord-
ing to people who have worked
for the Democratic Party during
caucuses.
During the Nevada caucuses
in 2008, the Obama campaign
created its own caucus calculator
using Microsoft Excel, according
to two people who worked on the
campaign. The software, which
did the caucus math, was used to
correct the vote in several pre-
cincts where errors were made,
they said, and that process re-
sulted in then-Sen. Barack
Obama (D-Ill.) winning more
delegates than he otherwise
would have gotten without the
oversight.
But the Obama campaign’s
know-how and strategy was nev-
er passed on to Democratic offi-
cials at t he state or national level,
they said. “A lot of people who
developed that stuff are at Uber
and Airbnb now,” said one of
them, who is now working for
Democratic presidential candi-
date Mike Bloomberg’s cam-
pa ign. That person spoke on the
condition of anonymity because
he was not authorized to speak
publicly.
Paper results will be used as
the official tally in Nevada, the
state’s Democratic Party has said.
Maggie MacAlpine, co-founder of
Nordic Innovation Labs, a con-
sultancy focused on election se-
curity, praised the party for cre-
ating paper redundancies to
guard against manipulation of
results.Election officials should use
reasonable restraint when it
comes to technology, MacAlpine
said. “We’re always advocating a
return to paper,” she said. Elec-
tion technology is the one place,
she said, where the more tech-
savvy people are, the more they
tend to advise against the use of
technology. The tools needed to
secure online elections are “not
even in their infancy yet,” she
said.
This year, the Nevada caucuses
bring additional challenges. In
an effort to increase voter turn-
out after long lines and confu-
sion in 2016, the party offered
early voting as an alternative to
the caucusing scheduled for Sat-
urday morning.
Rather than caucus, voters
could rank three to five candi-
dates by preference. Those re-
sults would later be incorporated
into Saturday’s caucuses. Turn-
out for early voting was high,
nearly matching the entire voter
turnout for the 2016 Democratic
caucuses, according to Nevada
Democrats, and lines at early-
voting sites stretched along side-
walks through Tuesday evening.
Michael Roybal, a 31-year-old
phlebotomist in Las Vegas, said
that when he saw the debacle in
Iowa on the news, he decided to
vote early. He waited more than
two hours to cast his v ote for Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a local
library Tuesday, where billion-
aire candidate To m Steyer had
paid for a five-person mariachi
band and a free taco stand to
entertain early voters. “The cau-
cus sounds like a mess,” Roybal
said. “I think a normal primary
would be fine.”
But the early voting created a
new problem for caucus volun-teers: more complicated math,
with lots of variables around
which candidates will make it
through to the final tally.
On Jan. 11, hundreds of volun-
teers poured into Centennial
High School in Las Vegas for a
training seminar on the new app
developed by Shadow, a Colorado
company led by veterans of Hil-
lary Clinton’s presidential cam-
paign that received funding from
Democratic political organiza-
tions. In the school’s all-purpose
room, Democratic Party officials
instructed the volunteers to
download the app to their
phones. The app, they said,
would be used by the volunteers
to count and submit vote counts
at the election.
Almost immediately, p roblems
arose, according to three people
who a ttended the training. About
half the people in attendance
were unable to download the
app. Others were able to down-
load it, but it wouldn’t open on
their phones. The app was not
available through Apple’s App
Store or Google’s Play Store.
Rather, i nstalling it first required
the installation of another app.
Donna West, a retired civil
servant who has a dog-sitting
business and is also chair of the
Clark County chapter of the Ne-
vada Democrats, said half of the
problems that day were due to
“user error,” and about half were
because of technological glitch-
es. “We discovered we had volun-
teers who don’t have smart-
phones, and so they don’t use
apps at all,” West said.
Eventually, the staffers
stopped trying to get the app to
work, said Seth Morrison, a vol-
unteer site leader for the caucus-
es who attended the m eeting. “ Bythe end of the day, they declared
failure,” he said. But the party
officials weren’t giving up on the
malfunctioning app. Instead,
they vouched for the vendor and
said it would be fixed before the
caucuses just over a month later.
On Feb. 3, as West watched the
Iowa debacle unfold on televi-
sion, she said she was surprised
to hear news reports that caucus
workers there had not attempted
to download the apps onto their
phones until the day of voting.
Soon after Iowa’s problems,
the Nevada Democratic Party
announced that its app was also
developed by Shadow and that it
would no longer use the app.
Shadow’s CEO, Gerard Niemi-
ra, declined to comment.
For many volunteers, that was
the first they heard that Iowa and
Nevada had planned to use the
same software vendor to conduct
the caucuses.
Now that the Democrats had
scrapped the Shadow app, Ne-
vada Democrats scrambled to
find a replacement, rather than
put the burden on volunteers to
do the complicated math by
hand.
On Feb. 8, the v olunteers again
filed into a local high school —
Western — to be trained on how
to carry out the Nevada caucuses.
The volunteers were broken up
into groups for mock caucuses,
using the names of Harry Potter
characters, where they were
walked through the process.
But there was one part of the
training that none of the volun-
teers got. They were told they
would be provided with iPads
and customized software that
would help them tally the vote
totals. The software was still
being developed, they were told.According to Morrison a nd the
other precinct leader, state offi-
cials would not answer basic
questions about how the app
would work, or who developed it.
“Every time it came to using the
tool, they’d say, ‘We’ll tell you
about it later,’ ” Morrison said.
Officials told volunteers that re-
vealing too much information
about the software would be
risky, because it would give a
head start to hackers, who might
try to exploit it and manipulate
the caucuses. This strategy,
known as “security through ob-
scurity,” is generally discouraged
by the cybersecurity industry.
It turns out the party had
decided to develop the software
in-house using Google Forms, a
fact the party revealed to volun-
teers Tuesday evening.
Google spokeswoman Katie
Wattie said the company has
provided customer service sup-
port to Nevada’s Democratic Par-
ty, as it would for any paying
customer, but the search engine
giant has not dispatched person-
nel to Nevada to offer extra help.
The Cisco software, called Me-
raki, could also help Nevada
officials remotely monitor signs
of suspicious activity. Cisco de-
clined to comment.
It wasn’t until Tuesday that
the volunteers had a chance to
see t he software i n person. In L as
Vegas, the party held a voluntary
training session at what ap-
peared to be a temporary office
in a strip mall. The lights in the
office were dark, leading some
volunteers to wonder whether
they were in the right place.
When a staffer for the Nevada
Democrats showed up at around
6:30 p.m., five volunteers entered
and sat around a brown table
with florescent lighting. One
br ought chips and guacamole for
the group to share.
The staffers, who later shared
what they were shown in the
meeting, said the caucus iPad
had only a single icon with the
letters CC, for caucus calculator.
When opened, the app asked for
login credentials, which would
be written d own on a folder given
to staffers. Site leaders say they
were told they will receive the
iPads a day or two before the
caucuses Saturday.
At each step of the way, volun-
teers are instructed to write the
results down on a piece of paper
and on a large poster that will
hang in the room during the
caucus. The results on paper, and
not the app itself, will be used for
the official results, the state party
has said.
When the volunteers enter the
vote totals from the room into
the iPad on caucus day, the
software will automatically ad-
just those totals based on the
number of early votes that were
cast in that precinct.
If the app or iPad malfunc-
tions for some reason, or there’s
no Internet connection, volun-
teers will have to do everything
by hand. If that happens, they’ll
be required to open an envelope
containing a spreadsheet w ith all
the early-vote totals. The enve-
lope will contain detailed in-
structions on how to allocate the
votes, the volunteers were told.
[email protected]Shaken by Iowa chaos, Nevada rushes to overhaul its vote-tallying system
Melina Mara/the Washington Post
Nevadans stand in line for early voting at the Nevada Culinary Union hall in Las Vegas on Tuesday. In an effort to increase turnout, the
Nevada Democratic Party offered early voting this year; the incorporation of those results adds another challenge to Saturday’s caucuses.Avoid the mess, time and cost of major
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