TECH-SAVVY Democrats get call to help in Nevada.
LAS VEGAS — The appeal to tech-savvy Democrats went out the week after technology crashed the Iowa caucuses — and days before the presidential nominating contest was set to touch down in Nevada.
The pitch was simple: “Your democracy needs you!”
That was the opening line of the email from Raffi Krikorian, the former chief technology officer at the Democratic National Committee. He sent the missive, obtained by The
Washington Post, on Feb. 12, as Democrats in Iowa were still coming to grips with their bungled caucuses, thrown into disarray by a glitch in the software used to transmit results.
The debacle became a case study in how technology can mar an election.
Krikorian, who has done stints at Uber and Twitter, wanted to make sure it did not happen again Saturday, when Democrats in Nevada convened at about 250 locations to weigh in on the nominating contest. As he wrote, “a group of us are helping the Nevada Democratic Party to try to bring technical volunteers in to help with the Nevada Caucuses.”
He asked whether people would be willing to travel to the Silver State, providing a Google sign-up sheet. Many were willing to assist. But some volunteers arrived on the eve of Saturday’s caucuses with no instructions from the party — underscoring enduring organizational problems plaguing Democrats in the early days of their nominating contest.
The recruitment drive illustrates how Democratic-aligned tech buffs are grappling with their role after the Iowa breakdown. It also reveals the extent to which state parties responsible for running caucuses — rather than election officials who carry out the primaries — depend on volunteers to execute the contests.
The task has become even more challenging since the DNC set transparency rules aimed at restoring public trust after allegations of bias in the 2016 primary. Those regulations require the reporting of raw support, in addition to the allocation of delegates, meaning volunteers are under heightened scrutiny as they calculate and record an expanding web of numbers.
The dependence on volunteers in particular creates risks and accountability gaps, according to lawmakers and experts.
“The state party obviously can’t afford to hire a large number of computer professionals to do this,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who chairs the congressional subcommittee that oversees federal elections. “They’re going to rely on volunteers, and that may or may not be suitable.”
The reliance on volunteers is perhaps most apparent in the last-minute development of new technology to ease the tabulation and verification of results on caucus day in Nevada, after the state party ditched reporting tools built by the same startup, Shadow Inc., used in Iowa’s first-in-thenation contest.
Some reinforcements arrived Friday without directions about what to do. After landing in Las Vegas, one person wrote in an email that, “there has been no follow-up, we are here in Vegas, and don’t know where to report for duty or what we should be doing to help.”