Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
DNC chairman rejects tele-caucus voting option in Iowa, Nevada
DES MOINES, Iowa — Democrats’ plans for virtual presidential caucuses in Iowa and Nevada are effectively dead as the national party chairman said Friday the results would be vulnerable to hacking and abuse.
Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, declared his opposition to plans for telephone voting submitted by the key early voting states of Iowa and Nevada, envisioned as part of the national party’s efforts to increase participation in the 2020 nominating fight.
“We concur with the advice of the DNC’s security experts that there is no tele-caucus system available that meets our standard of security and liability,” Perez said in a statement joined by the co-chairs of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.
The Iowa and Nevada parties had planned to allow some voters to cast caucus votes over the telephone in February 2020 instead of showing up at traditional caucus meetings.
The rules committee, which must approve all states’ primary and caucus plans, still must meet in the coming weeks to make the final decision, but Friday’s statement makes clear that will be a formality. The decision removes a potential cause of a flawed count on caucus night that could undermine the integrity of a process that has been criticized even in its traditional form.
The decision leaves the Iowa and Nevada state parties in limbo, without clarity on how they’ll meet the national party’s requirements to expand access to the caucuses. Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price said he would comply with the DNC’s decision, but that he wouldn’t speculate on any potential alternatives to the plan the party had originally put in place.
“We’re going to take the time we need to explore the options available to us, recognizing we still have five months till the caucuses,” he said.
Price also expressed confidence that Iowa would not have to scrap the caucuses overall, or lose its status as the first state in the nation to express a presidential preference.
It’s unclear how the elimination of the tele-caucus option will affect candidate strategy.
Conversations with campaign aides in Iowa and Nevada suggested most campaigns hadn’t done much planning around the virtual caucus yet because the exact processes hadn’t yet been approved by the DNC.
But at least one candidate, former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, called the DNC’s decision to scrap the virtual caucus an “affront to the principles of our democracy.”
William McCurdy II, the Nevada Democratic Party chairman, expressed disappointment but noted that his state still will have early caucus voting “to provide Nevada Democrats additional opportunities to participate in an important process that will have lasting effects on our country.”
Nevada’s plan to offer early, in-person caucusing is expected to meet the DNC’s requirement that states offer some alternate means of participating in traditional neighborhood meetings.
The party has planned to offer four early nights where voters may show up at a location and fill out forms listing their preferred candidate and at least one alternate. The DNC has not given final approval to that plan, but Artie Blanco, a DNC rules and bylaws committee member from Nevada, said Friday that she had not heard any security concerns about the early caucusing plan.
Blanco said plans for the tele-caucus involved creating technology that doesn’t yet exist. The states had hoped to work with the DNC to develop the telephone-based voting system but questions about how secure the system could be were raised back in a June DNC meeting. She said she’s hopeful that Democrats will work to create it by 2024.
“I’m disappointed that we’re not going to try to build this system this year,” Blanco said.