This morning, at 11:00 a.m., my wife and I went to participate in the NV Democratic party presidential caucus. I went out of a sense of curiosity, a sense of duty, and because I wanted to support John Edwards.
First, let me say, I saw no shenanigans, but I did see a lot of confused party officials. This was the first time for a caucus in Nevada, and well, it was a little embarrassing, it was so chaotic.
More over the flip...
Nationally, the Democratic party has a reputation of being confused and directionless. The Washoe County Democratic party certainly did their best to support that reputation. First, caucus locations were very confusing. An elementary school, less than 0.1 mile from our house, was the site of a caucus. But, we were sent to another school to caucus, about 4 miles away. Why? Who knows...
I got to hand it to the Obama campaign, though. They sent us quite a few flyers in the mail in the last week with the proper location. And they called me at least 10 times in the last week, to make sure I knew where to go. (I didn't get a single call or mailer from either the Edwards campaign or the Clinton campaign.)
At the caucus location, there was a lot of confusion over the actual rules. Our precinct captain read the rules out loud, and apparently, hadn't seen them before. After checking in, it took him at least 30 minutes to get an accurate head count (80). It just shouldn't be that hard to count people. For crying out loud, we checked in! Why wasn't that used as a head count?
Most of the party officials were representing one campaign or another. And there were lots of observers, those not registered to vote in Washoe County, and most of them were also representing one campaign or another. I saw no intimidation, and I saw no one intentionally misdirecting voters. But I sure did see a lot of confusion on the floor.
It turns out, the threshold for a viable candidate is NOT 15%, as has been often reported. The threshold depends on the size of your precinct. My precinct has only 3 county delegates, so the threshold is (1/6), i.e., 16.7%. Smaller precincts, with only 2 delegates, have a threshold of 25%.
So, each candidate needed to have 14 votes to be considered viable. In the first round, Edwards had 14, Obama 31, Clinton, 29, Kucinich 3, and 3 uncommitted. Close call for the Edwards campaign! And to think, my wife decided to go, just at the last minute...
Finally, we ended up with 3 more, and each campaign earned exactly the same number of delegates, i.e., one.
We got home by about 2:00. Three hours to complete what should have been done in an hour at most.
Well, it was fun. But, I've got to believe there's a better way to do these things. I'll be curious to hear about others' experiences.