By now, everyone has heard of the problems with the app that the Iowa Democratic Party purchased to aid in getting the caucus results.

First, I don’t believe that there was anything sinister with the provider of the app.  Yes, the company that makes the app has connections to people working for several of the campaigns and the Obama Administration.  But the world of political consultants is rather small.  Political parties need data bases to track voters and contacts in the various precincts and counties; so they tend to have relationship with certain software providers who have divided that type of information.  And political campaigns need that same type of data; so they are likely to have connections to the same consultants.  Some of the features needed for keeping an up-to-date list of voters and tracking the likely Democrats in each precinct (and updating based on canvasses) would seem to be comparable to what is needed to run caucuses and get results.  In any case, the process includes a paper “back-up” that has to be verified by the local representatives of each campaign.  So, while mistakes were made, to support a conspiracy theory, you would need to imply a lot of plants in all of the campaigns in the right locations.

Second, what does seem to have happened as a common tech problem.  As a government attorney, I have seen multiple generations of case management systems.  While the programming is beyond me, successful new systems have several things in common.  After getting the basic parameters, the programmers design a program to meet the requirements.  A bunch of internal alpha testers then sit down and try to use the system.  Their comments on what works and what doesn’t work then lead to revisions designed to fix any bugs in the software and make the system more user friendly.  Then you recruit beta testers from the pool of people who will have to use the system once it goes live.  Again, updates are made based on the comments from the beta testers.  Then the system is rolled out gradually starting with some pilot counties or pilot units within the office.  This gradual rollout allows training of small groups of users and a chance to fix the system when the real world experience doesn’t match the testing.   It may take eight or nine months (or even longer for something going to every county in a large state) before the system is running in every county and every office.  While there are certainly target dates, there are no absolute deadline.  So if things go poorly in the pilot counties, you can take the time to fix the problem.  (For example, when my state went to an electronic filing system for court pleadings, it took three to four years to get to 100+ counties.  And this gradual process allowed the trainers to spend two to three months with court staff in each county and to offer multiple training opportunities to attorneys.   Since my practice at the time involved multiple counties, by the middle of the process, I was used to using the system in half of my counties and couldn’t wait for the rest of the counties to get the system.)

A political party wanting an app doesn’t have the advantage of having room for delays unless it contracts for the app early in a two-year election cycle and has a target date nine or ten months before the election.  Getting an app that was still a work in progress several weeks before the election was not enough time to get a group of people who are essentially volunteers fully trained and to have adequate real world testing.

Now, as bad as the Iowa experience has been, the fear is that this experience could be repeated in Nevada.  Nevada originally planned to use the same app as Iowa.  So Nevada is having to make changes on the fly — a position that the Nevada Democratic Party would rather not be.  But the real problem is that Nevada is also experimenting with a new way of running a caucus.  The plan for the caucus involves an “early vote” with ranked choice voting.  The early vote results are supposed to be provided to the precinct chairs for each precinct caucus and added to the “live” attendees to determine which candidates are viable and how many delegates each candidate gets.  Now, the first count is easy to do by paper.  Each precinct chair could be given a sealed envelope to be opened in the presence of the representatives of the campaign after that first vote. The problem is the ranked choice.

While you could give a second sealed envelope with “printed out” ballots reflecting the early votes, as anybody who tracked the Irish election count over Sunday and Monday saw, the process of distributing preferences by hand is hard and time consuming. (Added to the fact, supporters of one non-viable group could move to a separate non-viable group or stay in their existing one.  If I am reading the rules and guidance correctly, first preferences are counted to determine if a group is viable after realignment but second preferences can only go to a group that is already viable.  I am not 100% sure that reading is correct.  If second preferences of early voters can make a group viable, then I am not sure how you figure out how a chair is supposed to deal with second preferences of two groups that are close to viable.)  What if, after realignment, there are two groups that are close to viability when you add in first preferences?  I am not sure that there is a simple way to provide the information to precinct chairs in a foolproof manner.

I hope that the Nevada Democratic Party is planning ahead and adding lots of phone lines and trained personnel to answer all of the questions that are bound to come from the over 2000 precincts in the state.  Like Iowa, Nevada is having to deal with new rules that add complexity to the caucus process while not having the technological aid which they thought they needed to handle this added complexity.  I am pessimistic that everything will run smoothly in every precinct.  Even in a state-run election with experienced election judges in most precincts, it is rare that there is no glitch somewhere in the state.  But given the problems in Iowa, Nevada is probably going to be facing unreasonable scrutiny.  And anything that goes wrong will go viral instantly.