Nevada attempts to avoid repeat of Iowa caucus chaos
DNC Chair Tom Perez says he's doing all he can to ensure the Silver State's contest runs smoothly; Mark Meredith reports.
Two early voters in Nevada gave Fox News vastly different reviews Monday of the revamped caucus results reporting process, a bid to avoid the chaos that victimized the Iowa caucuses earlier this month.
Under the Nevada system, precinct chairs will use iPads purchased by the party to calculate and submit results electronically through a Google web form, rather than the smartphone app that failed spectacularly in Iowa. Organizers will also be able to record the results on paper, just in case.
"I've been here for 50 minutes and I'm leaving now," one voter told "Special Report with Bret Baier," adding: "I did not get a chance to vote, but if this is how the DNC is going to run it again ..." before trailing off in apparent frustration.
However, a second voter told Fox News that "things went smoothly and quickly and it was kind of a pleasant process."
State party officials said they have been consulting with the Democratic National Committee, the Department of Homeland Security and technical experts. But election experts have warned that deploying new technology and making last-minute changes to the process without sufficient training and field testing increase confusion and the possibility of problems.
In recent days, volunteers who will be leading the Nevada caucuses had raised concerns that key information about the process had yet to be released and that there had been no hands-on training with the iPads they will be expected to use.
“Very much like Iowa, this sounds like a tremendous amount of information coming relatively late in the game for fallible human beings in a complex environment,” Eddie Perez, an election technology expert with the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that promotes reliable voting solutions, told the Associated Press last week. “And that creates risk for another process breakdown.”
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In order to send the results electronically, the iPads used by the precinct chairs must be connected to the Internet, whether through a cellular network or local WiFi. This presents a security concern that someone could access the iPads and interfere or manipulate data transfers.
The Nevada Democratic Party what security measures are in place to protect these data transmissions, including the use of passwords, multi-factor authentication and encryption. They said that WiFi available at all the caucus sites had been tested and that the iPads were 4G-enabled in the event WiFi failed. It's also not clear what security measures were in place to physically protect the devices themselves.
Fox News' Mark Meredith and The Associated Press contributed to this report.