First Principles

Saturday was the first time I have ever actually physically gone somewhere to cast a vote. Always before I voted absentee, either because I was away to college or in the Navy, or because I was in Washington State where they let anyone vote by mail and it was a lot more convenient. The caucus was quite the event.

I had volunteered previously with the County GOP, where they’d asked me to study up on our process and then send a letter to the local paper correcting their website. I was pretty glad – otherwise the process would have been a lot more confusing to me. It was bad enough as it was. That night there was a practice caucus, where we walked through the election of delegates to the county convention. It took too long then, and already it was clear that there was a lot of discontent brewing in the entire process.

The pre-planning was a mess. The state GOP sent out postcards to everyone telling them where their caucus locations were. The trouble was that half of them were wrong. I got a corrected postcard a few days before, but apparently not everyone did.

I don’t think the party did an adequate job educating the voters in what the purpose of the caucus was. The info was up on the website, but there was nothing really to alert people that they needed to read up on the process. The precinct postcards were a missed opportunity in that regard. Most people just wanted to vote for their preferred presidential candidate, but the caucuses here are as much (if not more) about choosing party reps to committees and conventions than about picking a presidential candidate. All that takes time, time most voters didn’t want to spend.

Ironically, that’s one of the biggest advantages of a caucus like this – it brings the regular voters into contact with the hard core party activists. The party folks are reminded that they’re spitting in the wind without the regular voters, and the everyday voters are reminded that there is a lot of work that must go on behind the scenes to set up their candidates – a process that’s surprisingly accessible.

One of the things that baffles me in the year 2008, though, is how ineffectively we use the technology available to us to communicate to the rest of the party faithful. One of the things I’ve always loved about the internet is how it fulfills the wildest dreams of the Founding Fathers as a means of getting the people directly involved in their government and their politics. The poor use of this technology to more actively reach out people in advance of the caucuses and teach them what they needed to know in order to maximize their impact on the process caused a lot of problems that could have been avoided.

The Caucus Itself

I showed up to Galena High about 7:30, because I’d said I’d volunteer to help. Thanks to the Mitt Romney supporters who lined the roadway for at least a mile with Romney signs. It’s no wonder Mitt did so well here – ground game matters, and knowing a candidate cares about your state matters even more. Even with that, I accidentally went to Truckee Meadows Community College for a few minutes. D’oh!

When I finally got to the high school 15 minutes later, there was a check-table being set up, and a training session in progress with a dozen other volunteers. There was a lot of working things out on the fly, things which should have been anticipated well in advance, likes maps of the school, amounts of sign up sheets, which volunteers needed to do what, etc. We were told that 8% of the registered Republicans per precinct was what we should expect, and 10% would be extraordinary. (My precinct had 13%.) Ballots had been printed to reflect the 10%, I think, which turned out to be a huge problem later.

Most of the other volunteers were older, which troubled me a bit. The Democratic party does such a better job mobilizing the energy and time that younger people have. Besides, if Churchill was right, why not take out the middle man and start early? Maybe some of the Ron Paul folks will stay in the party…

When I and another person were setting up the cafeteria a little after 8:00, a woman walked in bedecked in Hillary gear. The Democratic caucus started there at 11:00, and she was freaking out that we were setting up the cafeteria for our caucus that started at 9:00 and worrying about how they would make the transistion. (“Setting up” meant taping about 10 pieces of paper with precinct numbers to cafeteria tables.) It was irritating – you could tell that it barely occurred to her that other people were going to be voting as well, and that we might care about the Republican voters at least as much as we cared about the Democrats.

By then, people were starting to come in droves. I didn’t know it, but the line was backing up past the parking lot and towards the football field. The caucus HAD to start at 9:00 according to the rules, and so most people planned on being there about 8:30. But since over 2,000 showed up, people were waiting a long time just to get in the building. A lot of people got to their precinct location late, leading to some consternation. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if we didn’t have to get done in time for the Dems to get started a few hours later, but as it was, it created a lot of problems. Fortunately, most people only missed the delegate voting, which they didn’t really care about in the first place.

I was helping tell people where to go. There was only one map of the high school. We should have blown it up and made several posters. The high school was a maze. But by 8:45, more people were informally volunteering to help get people to the right places.

In the Precinct

When the line started to ease off a bit, I went into my precinct, since I’d already volunteered to be the secretary. Another weird part of the whole thing was the lopsided sized of the precincts. Some of them only had a few dozen registered Republicans in them, but ours had over 1,000. Instead of sitting around a table with a few neighbors, we were in the theater on the stage with a microphone. 133 people voted in our precinct. Apparently four precincts didn’t have any people come at all.

That’s where things got a little more energizing. I was checking IDs of the people who came in, and it was nice to meet a lot of my neighbors. It’s too easy to get disconnected with the people you live around. People were generally in a good mood, although it was souring as the latecomers walked in due to the long, cold lines. I saw my next door neighbor, who seemed very relieved to discover that I was a Republican. I met another neighbor for the first time, with whom I share a home town.

People were laughing and joking. From the stickers on people’s shirts, it was clear that it was a Romney crowd (as, apparently, was all of Nevada). I expected a much stronger Ron Paul presence, and a much more obvious one. And for all the big and sometimes heated differences between the Republican candidates, I didn’t see any of that played out in the crowd. Indeed – there was a lot of comfort of the kind that comes from being able to be open and vocal about your political leanings in public.

I don’t think we actually got going until about 9:30, with the steady stream of people still filing in. We nominated delegates to the county convention in March. Our precinct had 22 delegate slots, and this is where the Ron Paul crowd really showed off their organizational muscle. Ron Paul got less than 10% of the vote in our precinct, but I’d guess at least a third of the 23 “candidates” for a delegate slot were in his camp.

At that point each candidate made a little speech about who they supported, and why they should go to the convention. This mattered, since our caucus was non-binding, which meant the candidates could vote for whoever they pleased in the convention. But the size of our precinct and the lack of time made the intended dickering over who should represent us and why impossible. I proposed that if one person was willing to stand down, we could merely vote in the entire slate, and the group approved it. We did the same thing with the alternate delegates, and in fact we had to do a little nudging to get another 22.

At this point there was a little hate and discontent. Not everyone understood how the delegate system worked. A lot of people assumed that we would vote for a candidate as a precinct, and that whoever came out on top (who would surely be Romney) would get all of the votes at the convention. Others assumed that people were bound by the vote tally in the room, but didn’t know how we’d get that information to the candidates.

After explaining some of the mechanics, people were getting a little ornerier, especially when it was clear that there was no guarantee that the delegate count would reflect the preferences of the precinct. It was worse when it was clear that neither I nor the precinct captain knew how to get the secret ballot info to the delegates, or to the precinct at large. Later we found out we could just get the results from the counting room, but we didn’t know that yet. We finally resolved to do a head count after the paper ballots were in.

About this time, the Democrats were starting to pile up outside, and were ready to get going. Twice some rep came in and told me we needed to move it along. I told them we’d go as fast as we could while still doing things correctly, and not faster. According to my wife, some of the Dems outside started pounding on the theater doors, yelling at us to hurry up. So much for wanting every vote to count. It was inexcusably rude. I was saddened and angered by it when I found out – I thought I’d left that kind of 60’s ridiculousness behind in Seattle.

We almost forgot to elect our three county GOP Central Committee (an ironically Soviet sounding name) members. Three people volunteered, and then someone nominated me. We made short speeches and did a show-of-hands vote count. So now I’m a member of the Central Committee, which I can’t say I’m upset about. It’s better than just complaining about the way things are going.

When we finally got to the voting, a rep from each candidate was supposed to make a speech on behalf of their guy. Someone stood up and suggested we dispense with that, since we all pretty much knew who was who anyway. It was a great idea, although I was disappointed that we missed out on that part. I’m always curious to understand why people are voting for different people. On the other hand, I imagine all I missed was a two minute amateur reproduction of a standard stump speech in a precinct as large as ours. And by then, people just wanted to vote and then get out of there anyway.

As soon as we pulled the ballots out of our envelope, it was clear there was only about a third of what we needed. We didn’t even have other paper on hand, although someone got some later. All I could find was a pad of sticky notes. People were getting really cranky at that point, certain that the tabulators would never count the improvised “ballots” and that they had come for nothing. It was a fair worry. Worse, it made the party look like incompetent boobs – not exactly the formula for ensuring participation and turnout in November. Then people voted and left, which means we never had our show of hands for the delegates. (At least we have their E-mail addresses, so all will turnout well, but that didn’t stop many, I’m sure, from leaving with a sour taste in their mouth.)

Mitt Romney carried our precinct handily with 55.6% of the vote. Huckabee came in second with 15.8%, then McCain with 13.5%, Ron Paul with 9.8%, Fred Thompson with 6%, Rudy Giuliani with 5.3%, and Duncan Hunter with 0.8%.

Aftermath

As soon as the first people cast their ballots and began to leave, the Democrats started streaming in. That was another annoyance, since we still had people shuffling up to give us their ballots. It also took away from what little order and confidence that everyone got to vote and that every vote would count, since we couldn’t ensure every ballot was in, and not everybody could see us seal the envelope.

We all left, and finished distributing the paperwork. It had been pretty exhausting, but still fun. People were grumbling about the process, but thought we’d done pretty well with what we had to work with. I got to chat with some more people from the neighborhood, and then we were off.

As I was leaving the building and walking to my car, it was fun to observe the Dem party faithful. It’s just a different crowd. They’re younger, and were dressed more “colorfully.” There were plenty of aged hippies. The younger the voter, the more excited they seemed – older Democrats looked downright sour on the whole. And then there was the three Code Pink members apparently urging people in line to check in to sign their petition to support the impeachment of President Bush. Ah, liberal activism! Thank God it doesn’t dominate my city the way it did Seattle. I don’t miss it.

Thoughts

In the days that followed, there was much wailing an gnashing of teeth about the whole process on both sides of the isle. The State Senate Minority Leader, a Democrat, announced that she would introduce a bill that would kill the caucus. Some of the beefing was legit. A lot of it was whining by people who didn’t bother to read up on the caucus system ahead of time, and were planning on just showing up and letting someone tell them what to do, and then blamed everything on the poor planing by the party.

A lot of people wanted to “go back” to a primary. But the Nevada primaries had always been in late summer, after the nominee was assured. There were caucuses, but there were party affairs unknown to and unattended by most voters. So while people complained (rightly) that military people, weekend workers, the elderly, and others were without a voice, the net gain was that for the first time, at least some Nevadans had the chance to have a real hand in the Presidential nomination process. It’s hard to see how that’s a step in the wrong direction.