Having discredited itself with utter (and very public) incompetence in tallying up the Iowa caucuses, the Democrats are reportedly on the verge of another disaster in Nevada. Politico headlines:

'A complete disaster': Fears grow over potential Nevada caucus malfunction Anxiety is rising over the possibility of another tech-induced meltdown at the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday. In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 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 2,000 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 forms accessible through a saved link on the iPads — after scrapping a pair of apps they'd been planning to use until a similar app caused the fiasco in Iowa two weeks ago. The volunteers also said the party has not provided sufficient training on how to use the Google form that will compile vote totals, a complicated process in a caucus.

All the volunteers who spoke out did so anonymously. Of course. Because Democrats are a swell bunch who enjoy bad news and critical feedback about as much as Chinese communist officials do when reporting coronavirus infections and deaths.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that some precincts are "speeding" early voting with...paper ballots.

For at least one early voting precinct in the Las Vegas Valley on Sunday, pivoting to a paper check-in did exactly what Nevada Democratic Party officials said it was designed to do: speed up the process when necessary. But state Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II, who shook hands with voters outside IBEW Local 357 in Las Vegas, did not address specifically whether lessons had been learned from the day before, when voters at multiple presidential caucusing sites reported waiting for hours and a local Democratic club leader said the party didn't have enough iPads to check voters' registration. McCurdy said the system allows "our precinct chairs to utilize a low-tech, easy option on caucus day." McCurdy also said volunteers would "be ready" and continue to be trained through the week on a Google-powered custom calculator being used to track results.

Dems have five more days to offer training to the officials supposed to be using iPads, a technology that is now almost a decade old. The Review-Journal's reporting leaves doubts as to how much, if any, time is being saved by using the mature technology:

Volunteers using iPads at the AFL-CIO site scrolled manually through pages of voter information to find voter names and IDs before giving each voter a ballot. At the Culinary Local 226 site in Las Vegas, volunteers were observed using iPads to check-in voters who reported waiting about an hour to vote. Participants at the IBEW Local 357 site reported a wait time between 40 minutes to an hour.

Following the Iowa debacle, the Democrat brand came to be associated with incompetence. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal:

The party's problem is that it doesn't look competent anymore. The Iowa caucus debacle came on top of the Trump impeachment, another low-turnout event with the public. People began telling reporters that the three-year death struggle between Democrats and President Trump wasn't their idea of Washington's purpose. (snip) During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt struck a defining bargain with the public: Cede to the government expanded powers over the details of American life, and government will administer it efficiently. For the public, giving government the power to regulate and rule was supposed to be a net plus. The bargain behind Bernie Sanders's Medicare for All, funded by new taxes on the middle class, is that it too will be a net plus. Come Election Day in November, will 50% of the electorate actually believe Democrats today could competently administer a national health-care system in the U.S.?

Any rational organization would devote its entire energy to training and rehearsing the vote check-in and tallying process the next five days. But we are talking about Democrats, so stay tuned.