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Sen. Kamala Harris speaks at a town hall meeting in North Las Vegas in March. Nevada is one of two states that will allow participation by phone in the 2020 caucuses.
Pivotal caucuses will allow Democrats to phone it in
If you use the telephone to declare your presidential preference, have you really participated in your party's caucuses?
Yes, say the Democrats of Iowa and Nevada, where next winter's caucuses will be crucial to winnowing the sprawling field of candidates into a handful with a genuine shot at getting nominated to take on President Trump.
In both bellwether contests, where human contact has been a central part of the process for years, it will no longer be necessary to join an evening of last-minute jawboning and deal-cutting before casting a ballot in an overheated church basement or high school cafeteria. A Democratic loyalist will be able to, quite literally, phone it in.
The tele-caucusing innovations were announced by party officials in Nevada on Monday, when the Democratic National Committee signaled its endorsement of the plan unveiled a few months ago in Iowa, home of the first contest. The states are also part of the first experiments with ranked-choice voting at the presidential level.
The changes have been pushed on them by the DNC in an effort to open the presidential nominating process to more people and to foster more competition. Voting by phone should especially help boost turnout by enfranchising Democrats who have been excluded from past caucuses because they work nights, are physically disabled, can't find child care or aren't confident driving long distances on a snowy winter night. And laborers, young parents and the elderly are all key constituencies within the party.
Surveys in Nevada haven't been taken yet. But polling in Iowa suggest as many as one in five Democrats will participate remotely and virtually. If that happens, it will underscore one of the fastest developing trends in the world of modernizing elections with a priority on expanding turnout: Letting people vote in as many ways as possible for as long as practical – by phone or by mail as well as in person, not just on Election Day but for weeks beforehand.
Because of the time commitment involved to both get to and participate in caucuses, they have had notoriously low turnout and so have been abandoned by the Democrats in all but a handful of states for 2020. Last time, for example, just 8 percent of Nevadans of voting age went to either the Republican or Democratic caucus – but turnout in the two New Hampshire primaries a week earlier crested 52 percent.
Iowa and Nevada have decided to use dial-in voting instead of balloting online, not only to minimize the potential for hacking but also to boost turnout by poor or rural people who don't have broadband Internet access.
Both state parties will require Democratic voters to register online in advance of their virtual caucus, when they will have to verifying their identity with a "multi-factor authentication" including a one-time-use-only PIN. Voters will be able to choose from several languages before declaring their preferences and then will be able to confirm their choices before their votes are recorded.
Yet officials acknowledge that relying on phone systems does raise security concerns.
"Are they unhackable? Certainly not," Jeremy Epstein, a voting systems expert with ACM, the largest international association of computer science professionals, told the Associated Press. "None of these technologies are really bullet proof."
Iowans will have six days in which to participate, including the Feb. 3 in-person caucus night. Nevadans can participate Feb. 16 or 17 but, unlike in Iowa, they can also choose to join one of four days of in-person early caucusing.
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The Princeton Gerrymandering Project has released a new database to track state-level redistricting reform.
There's a new state-by-state guide for tackling partisan gerrymandering
An advocacy project at Princeton University has released a new guide for those who want to combat excessive partisanship in the drawing of legislative districts, hoping it will be a roadmap to help citizens push for fairer maps in all 50 states.
The guide was created by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project and released on the heels of last month's Supreme Court ruling that federal courts will not be in the business of assessing partisan gerrymandering claims.
The Princeton project's state information page offers a color-coded map that divides states by "key redistricting features." Eighteen are shaded dark or light green, for example, signaling a third-party commission or demographer already guides the drawing of voting districts.
Both Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid have taken hacks at the filibuster rules, but it's time to go even further, writes Golden.
McConnell opens door for Democrats to unrig the system: End the filibuster
Golden is the author of "Unlock Congress" and a senior fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy, which seeks to improve democracy on a global scale. He is also a member of The Fulcrum's advisory board.
It may seem like recent Supreme Court decisions have the conclusive power to halt reform efforts to unrig congressional districts and suck the billions of dollars out of our politics. But this is really not the case. A path remains for Democratic leaders to restore fairness and common sense to American elections. But in order to do it, they'll need to rip a page out of Mitch McConnell's book and restore majority rule to the Senate.
The fact is that millions of Americans of different political stripes crave electoral reforms that would make the House more accurately reflect voter preferences and would slash the corruptive influence of big money on Capitol Hill.
