Nevada Democrats to rely on paper-based early caucus voting
Associated Press | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 6 years, 6 months AGO
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Nevada’s Democratic Party has announced new paper-based balloting for its early vote starting Saturday as it scrambles to reconfigure plans and avoid tech problems and reporting delays that mired Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses.
The party, which dumped its original plan to have people cast early caucus votes with an app downloaded on iPads, is working to simplify the process and build in “additional redundancies” that minimize errors, according to a memo from executive director Alana Mounce released Tuesday.
Volunteers will use iPads loaded with a PDF of the Nevada voter roll to check in voters who show up to participate in four days of early voting, according to Mounce's memo. Each voter will be given a card with the voter registration ID number and a PIN, both of which the voter will enter when checking in online via a Google form.
Voters will then fill out paper ballots ranking their top choices for the Democratic presidential nominee. Paper ballots will be collected and taken to processing hubs, where they’ll be scanned to read results.
Early vote results will be kept secret until the main caucuses have started on the afternoon of Feb. 22, and any early votes cast will be added to those made in person at caucuses.
The memo does not address how the party plans to share the early vote results with volunteers leading more than 2,000 precinct caucuses on Feb. 22, the main voting day. Nevada had originally planned to have volunteers use an app similar to the one used last week in Iowa, created by the same firm, to share that info and tabulate final results.
The Nevada Democratic Party has not offered any timeline for providing more details.
___
Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, “Ground Game.”
ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hong Kong police arrest 4 from university student union
HONG KONG (AP) — Four members of a Hong Kong university student union were arrested Wednesday for allegedly advocating terrorism by paying tribute to a person who stabbed a police officer and then killed himself, police said.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.