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Wed, 05 Mar 2008 or, Precinct Captain Sam(ir) Yesterday was primary day here in Texas. Most of the time the primary results here are meaningless, but this year the Obama-Hillary race is hot and every delegate counts. Thus, I was determined to do my civic duty and vote. Early in the morning, after dropping Katherine off at her lab, I headed to the middle school near my house that served as the voting place for my precinct. Unfortunately, when I got to the head of the line, it turned out that I was still registered in a different precinct—the one I'd been in last election, a 20+ minute drive away. I determined that I'd go vote around 6:00p and wait around to take part in the caucus at 7:15p (yes, Texas has both). I arrived at the polling place around 6:30p, well in time to get in the doors (which closed at 7:00p) and vote. Since there were only three voting machines, the people who were in the voting place at 7:00p took until almost 8:00p to finish their voting. After that, we waited for over an hour before they were finished "closing the books," as they told us. Apparently some time during that hour they got scared that the 150 people waiting around to caucus would get rowdy, because 6 police officers showed up—you know, to keep the peace. Now it got interesting. The dude came out with the caucus folder and asked who the Precinct Chair was. Turns out, there was no precinct chair, at which point it became rule of the unlame—in this case, me. After appointing a Secretary pro tempore, deputizing a bunch of people to run the sign-in sheets (despite starting almost 2 hours late, we still had over 100 people caucusing!), and getting everyone organized and signed in, I explained the process of the caucus meeting to everyone and (as prescribed by procedure) called for the election of a new Chair and Secretary. Now, whereas I was pro-Obama and our temporary Secretary was pro-Clinton, the roles switched: the Chair was a Clinton campaign volunteer (who turned out to be a nice guy once he calmed down a bit) and the Secretary was pro-Obama. Such was the tone for the rest of the meeting: I worked through the sign-in sheets checking voter ID numbers, counted the votes, and computed the delegates, all with oversight from the Clinton camp. Then a Clinton person independently verified my results with oversight from an Obama supporter. Things got a little hairy because we couldn't verify the identities of two of the people who had signed in, but I moved successfully that we compute everything with and without those two votes to determine if it made a difference in how the delegates were assigned. If it did not, we resolved, we would simply count them (to avoid having to go through the process of striking votes) and proceed. Luckily, the delegates were the same by both counts. Finally, we got to the fun part: picking the 8 Obama and 5 Clinton delegates to the county caucus (plus alternates). By then we were down to fewer than 30 people, so it was really just a matter of determining who wanted to be a delegate and then convincing the rest of the people that being an alternate probably wouldn't actually entail any work. At midnight—three hours after starting the whole process—we'd finished. Who knew that dispensing democracy would remind me so much of running a Random Hall general election? For that matter, who knew Robert's Rules of Order would come in handy when arguing with anyone other than Roger Ford or JHawk? writebackScott wrote
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