Caucus Night at Precinct 54

I attended the Harris County Precinct 54 caucus and convention tonight and had a great time. The turnout was amazing, I think there were over 500 people there between the two precincts that share the same voting site. People were well-behaved and formed orderly lines even though we all had to wait outside in the cold while the primary voting finished up.

The caucus process itself was orderly but only because it was carried out directly contrary to the Rules of the Democratic Party of Texas and the various memorandums and FAQs distributed by the party in the days leading up the caucus.

The Obama and Clinton people lined us all up and had us come into the building and fill out the sign-in sheet where we indicated our preference for president. So far, so good. Then we all sat around and voted on the chair and the secretary of the convention and various non-binding resolutions while people tallied the sign-in sheets that would determine the number of delegates that would be distributed to each candidate. One of the resolutions was to fine people who don't vote in the primary and donate the money to local libraries. I kid you not. An older lady got up and denounced the resolution as "fascist." Again, this actually happened. The resolution was voted down though we did approve three resolutions: one denouncing the Trans-Texas Corridor, one calling for an end to the caucus system in Texas, and one calling for an end to the super-delegate system nationwide. And so we carried on a proud Democratic tradition of resolving to do things that we won't actually do. Rock on.

This is when things started to go wrong, though the problems were not disclosed to any of the participants ahead of time; I only found out because I asked the people who tallied the sheets after everything was over. It turns out that no attempt was made to verify that the people who signed in had voted in the Democratic primary, nor was any attempt made to verify that the people who showed up even lived in the precinct. According to section 172.1141 of the Texas Election Code, the election judge of the precinct is supposed to provide a list of voters to the chair of the precinct convention. Article IV, Section (B)(4) (PDF) of the Democratic Party Rules says that you are only eligible to participate in the convention if you voted in the Democratic primary. The convention chair is supposed to verify eligibility before the caucusing occurs and the delegates are allocated to the candidates. This never happened in my precinct. Instead, the Obama people and the Clinton people got together and tallied the sign-in sheets. They basically came to a gentleman's agreement that all of the people who signed in were going to be allowed to participate even though no one had checked their eligibility. This wasn't announced before the caucusing began; I had to go ask the Obama and Clinton people how they checked eligibility so fast and they said that they didn't. It will be up to people to challenge the results if they want to. The state party isn't going to check eligibility unless people challenge the results.

People are going to challenge the results and my guess is that lots of precinct conventions went down the same way because it was late and there were lots of people there and there was no time to check them all and have any hope of keeping them around. That means that the state party isn't going to be able to allocate delegates until every precinct is either checked against the list of people who voted or the deadline for challenging the results--if there is a deadline--passes. What a mess.

The end result in precinct 54 is that Obama got 16 delegates and Clinton got 13. This is not the same as the delegates that you see on CNN and NYTimes.com, those delegates won't be allocated until the state convention in a couple of months, but the precinct level delegate count will give an indication of how the state-level delegates will be allocated. Confused yet? Good. I'm an Obama delegate for the senatorial district convention on March 29th. I figure I'll keep nominating myself and see if I can make it all the way to Denver.

As if 500 people showing up and being left in the dark as their votes were potentially diluted by non-eligible participants wasn't enough, someone had a heart attack while we were all waiting around to get in to the school so an ambulance and a fire truck showed up. It sounded like the guys was going to be OK.