 So I want to take some time to talk about the upcoming Nevada caucus, but before I do that We have a public service announcement coming directly from the Bernie Sanders campaign He tweeted if you vote early you must select three options on your ballot or your vote will not be counted If you don't have a second or third choice candidate select uncommitted as your second and third choices See sample ballot here now as you can see from the sample ballot since this is a caucus You do have the opportunity to rank your second and third choices I believe you can select more than that But this is actually great in practice. However, there is a danger that if you don't rank your choices Then your ballot will not be counted. So please make sure that you follow the instructions now back to the Iowa caucus itself Well, the good news is that Bernie Sanders is absolutely dominating according to polls He is sitting at 35 percent and the only other candidate who reaches viability Barely is Elizabeth Warren Now mainstream media will spin this and say well, you know what 65 percent of the field doesn't support Bernie Sanders So actually he's not in first place, but understand this Bernie Sanders is Poised to do well in Nevada and if he dominates in Nevada He can have enough momentum to win South Carolina, which is arguably Joe Biden's firewall It's a must win state for Joe Biden. So this is huge But the bad news is that There's a lot of indications that The Nevada caucus will be a disaster just like the Iowa debacle now We don't know for sure yet Although the preliminary rundown from volunteers is that you know, it's not good This headline from Politico kind of explains it quote a complete disaster Fears grow over potential Nevada caucus malfunction Volunteers complain of poor training for a vote reporting system that was adopted on the fly So basically anyone who has been training who's been a volunteer or a caucus leader They've seen the tool that they're working with. It's not an app. It's an iPad tool So not an app wink wink and they're basically saying This is going to be a complete and utter disaster now I mean Again, we should expect that a bare minimum that these state Democratic parties will be able to count the votes and deliver the results to us. But again, we have this situation where We don't know what to expect. Are we going to get the votes on Saturday? Will we know who won? Will they release the results gradually throughout the week as they did in, you know, after Nevada? We don't know anyone associated with the Nevada caucus who's been volunteering Is saying this according to Laura Baron Lopez of Politico in interviews three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed Preparations for the February 22nd election Including insufficient training for a newly adopted electronic vote tally system And confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses There are also unanswered questions about the security of internet connections at some 2000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central war room set up by the Nevada democratic party Some volunteers who will help run caucuses at precinct locations Said they have not been trained on ipads that the party purchased to enter and transmit vote counts Party officials scrambled to streamline their vote reporting system Settling on google forums accessible through a saved link on the ipads after scrapping a pair of apps They've been planning to use until a similar app caused the fiasco in iowa two weeks ago The volunteers also said that the party has not provided sufficient training on how to use the google forum That will compile vote totals a complicated process in a caucus One volunteer who has worked on past caucuses in nevada Said the google form that will be used to input vote totals wasn't even mentioned during a training session For precinct chairs late last week the ipads weren't discussed until more than halfway through the presentation The volunteer said when someone asked how early vote totals would be added to the totals compiled live at each precinct The person leading the training said not to worry because the ipads would do the math for them Quote there were old ladies looking at me like oh We're going to have ipads the volunteer told politico after sitting through the two hour training session The person predicted the caucus would be a quote complete Disaster and this is what a volunteer told politico yikes big yikes. This is just incredibly worrying and the volunteers who are Uh in charge of administering early voting are saying that there's already difficulties getting The app or excuse me the ipad tool to function They're having difficulties getting it to connect to the internet. It's not functioning properly in some cases I mean Early voting if this were going smoothly We would maybe think that there'd be some hope for the actual caucus itself, but I mean They have the test right now right early voting has started and you see a huge turnout 18 000 plus people casting their ballots In early voting and they're already reporting that there are some issues. So this is incredibly incredibly worrying We don't need another iowa debacle because if this continues to happen You are going to depress the democratic party base You're helping donald from and republicans and there has to be accountability for this right Otherwise, we're not going to be assured that this won't happen going forward And sure the iowa democratic party leader troy price resigned Although, you know, there is a lot that the dnc did that hasn't really been reported They according to leak documents have been in charge of a lot of aspects that led to the app malfunctioning or the app itself They didn't attest it. There's a lot of blame to go around But we haven't seen an adequate amount of accountability that tells us that the people Who led to the iowa debacle are out of the picture, right? We haven't seen resignations from anyone at the dnc So we're expecting disaster and a site leader in nevada went on cnn And you could just hear in his voice. He is not confident that this is going to go well Week out early voting starts today Organizers have had a significant amount of time to get ready for the caucuses Um, how far along in the trading are you or other volunteers? Are you as confident? I'm not quite as confident, but they've been working very hard And I am personally really encouraging early voting Because early voting will minimize many of the risks that we'll be talking about They it is accurate that we're not using an app per se But we are using an untested software tool in the caucus room And I do worry that the caucus process Will be confusing and flawed when you say untested I apologize if it sounds like i'm cutting you off because we've got a delay But would you say untested? How's the training going on this this new process? We've never we we have had a lot of training on the broad process We have never seen Or handled this tool. Oh, wow. They keep telling us as early as last night That we'll show it to you when it is ready So it's not ready a week out That's what the trainers have said as recently as yesterday. Yeah, not very reassuring this process I'm not ready for whatever this process Um delivers Now he said later on in that clip that in the event something goes wrong with the ipad What the nevada state democratic party is telling caucus leaders and site leaders to do Is to call them just give them a call except What do they do in that situation if everything goes wrong at once and the phone lines are blocked? That's kind of what happened In iowa, right you had caucus leaders on hold for hours couldn't get through the phones were blocked So, I mean, what do you do in that situation? Like we need to have a backup plan and then a backup plan for the backup plan We need plans a b c d because if something goes wrong and it probably will You have to have some sort of failsafe And the fact that people who are going to be You know in charge the volunteers don't have the confidence tells me that this is going to be a huge debacle And if it's not an outright disaster Then certainly some precincts are going to suffer like you're forcing older people Who aren't familiar with ipads and technology in general to use ipads like why I Why are you changing this just let them do what they did before it worked fine or as fine as it possibly could With you know a caucus because caucus is just in general our clusterfucks, but why are you changing this? I mean it's just It's a debacle. It is a complete debacle and early voting is the thing that gives me hope Thankfully, you know, there's a form of ranked choice But if you don't actually rank choices, you know two and three select them if you don't select uncommitted then it's not gonna count I mean, what a disaster What a disaster you are communicating to people who are on the fence about voting democrat Like the the gettable trump supporters that look the democratic party They can't even run an election. So how are we supposed to trust them to run the country? And again Bare minimum that's all we're asking is for them to do the bare minimum So I will wait and see we all should wait and see but let's just hope that they go above and beyond to make sure That their staffers their volunteers are trained and they Not just know what they're doing but actually feel confident like they can teach it if they need to Because this is an election like this is this is incredibly serious people's lives are at stake People take this seriously rightfully so so I mean we shouldn't be worried That these caucus leaders don't feel confident and may make a mistake because they're forced to use An app on an ipad or an ipad tool that they don't think is going to work properly or they don't know How to use it. I mean this this shouldn't be happening and they shouldn't be trained this closely You know the minute that iowl went wrong they should have been training them immediately But they still don't have all the details. They don't necessarily know They're having issues with the ipads with regard to them functioning improperly and connecting to the internet Just whatever you do Make it work figure it out and get it done you have A few days just just get it done. I mean we shouldn't have to be worrying about this. Just Just get it done. Jesus Christ. It's not that difficult. Just count the votes Have something in place if the app doesn't work And just just report the votes to us. That's all we're asking just be more competent than iowa. The bar is very low at least So pass that bar that they said that low bar do that and I'll be happy