The Nevada Democratic Party has reportedly hired a former Pete Buttigieg staffer to lead its voter protection efforts, increasing fears that party leaders are trying to rig the nomination in favor of the ex-mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

On Sunday, it emerged that Nevada Democrats had hired Emily Goldman to be their director of voter protection. Goldman, who has a law degree from the University of Michigan, was most recently a top organizer for the Buttigieg campaign in Iowa. Little is known about the parameters of her new position, especially as the Nevada state party had not announced the hire publicly and has yet to include Goldman’s biography and title on their website. Goldman, herself, added to the mystery by locking her professional and private social media accounts after news of the hiring first broke.

The revelations about Goldman’s newfound role comes as progressive backing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are worried the Democrat establishment is trying to rig the nominating contest in favor of a moderate, pro-business candidate.

The suspicion stems from the 2016 Democratic primaries, where leaders of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) reportedly went to great length to assure former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the nomination over Sanders. Anti-Sanders bias among DNC leaders was best exhibited during that primary campaign by Donna Brazile. Despite being a high-ranking DNC official at the time, Brazile was infamously caught feeding questions to Clinton prior to a CNN Democrat town hall between the candidates in March 2016.

Given that history, Sanders supporters have begun speculating that Buttigieg is now the vehicle through whom the establishment plans to deny their candidate the nomination. Such fears seemed to be confirmed last week when it became public that Buttigieg’s campaign paid tens of thousands of dollars to the technology firm behind the Iowa Caucus disaster.

As Breitbart News previously reported, Buttigieg’s campaign paid Shadow Inc. more than $21,000 for “software rights and subscriptions” in July 2019. A few months later, the Iowa Democratic Party hired the firm to develop an app to streamline the reporting of results for their eponymous caucuses. The app, though, malfunctioned horribly on the day of the caucuses, causing a massive delay in the reporting and tabulation of results.

Buttigieg’s payments to Shadow and the fact the company CEO appears to be one of his supporters quickly drew the ire of progressives aligned with Sanders. Many even used the hashtag “#MayorCheat” to ding Buttigieg on social media for what they saw as collusion to undermine the integrity of the caucuses.

Complicating matters is that the Nevada Democratic Party also contracted Shadow Inc. to develop a reporting app for its caucuses. That detail, coupled with Goldman’s hiring, seems to indicate for many in the Sanders camp that the Nevada Democratic Party is behind Buttigieg.

After such blistering rebukes, the Nevada Democratic Party was forced to defend its hiring of Goldman on Sunday.

“We have many former campaign staffers and volunteers working to protect the integrity of this caucus, including people from [Sen. Kamala] Harris, Sanders, and [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren’s campaign — it is not unusual or uncommon for this to happen,” a spokesperson for the party told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.