Chaos At The Caucus

With lines to the end of the Galena High School parking lot and the top of the hour drawing near a mild sense of panic began to rumble through the Reno crowd as word of the doors being shut at 9 a.m. started to spread. Some said it would close at nine sharp, others said they surely couldn't do that, but nobody knew for sure. Not even the Ron Paul supporter sporting a pair of pony-tails hanging from the front of his shaved head. All he could do was wish you luck if you made it in. Well, that and a request to vote for Paul.

But as uncertain as things seemed outside the Nevada Republican Caucus Saturday morning it only grew more hectic once a person finally made it in. If you were the first from your precinct you were automatically put in charge, whether you wanted to or not, and given a huge packet filled with an American flag, ballots, some instructions, a donation envelope and a myriad of forms.

So while voters wandered the halls of the school trying to find their precinct, a fresh-faced Mitt Romney supporter earnestly scanned the crowd looking for those unfortunate few with the big manila envelopes. She approached one and asked if he could have a Romney delegate read from her flier. She needn't have bothered.

Although there were a litany of procedures and elections scheduled to take place first, it quickly became apparent that once people finally found their precinct room 90% of them just wanted to vote for their presidential preference and leave. Becoming and/or voting for specific delegates wasn't at the top of their agenda.

So precinct chairmen, with little to no direction, had to decide what to do. First and foremost was when to actually start. With hundreds of people still in line waiting to enter, should they begin at the appointed time of 9:15 a.m. or wait. But that was just the beginning of the problems.

Apparently many of the precinct packets had the wrong number of delegates assigned to them. In one room, shared by two precincts, both thought they had five each (one packet had three originally but it had been crossed out and "five" written in). Once one group had five who wanted to be delegates, they borrowed the forms of the other since someone said it was a "contiguous" precinct. Whether it was correct or not didn't seem to matter.

So in the end, one precinct had close to the assumed allotment of 10 delegates, though nobody knew who supported who, prompting one caucus goer to ask how do they know who they are voting for. The answer was simple, it "didn't matter" as: a) there wasn't going to be an election of delegates since there were enough slots for people who actually wanted to be one, and b) the delegates were nonbinding anyway. Delegates can vote for who they choose come April 26 at the state convention.

Then there were the problems with the voter rolls given to precinct chairmen. The smaller of the above precincts only had one other voter appear and, as luck would have it, his name wasn't among the 250+ listed as registered Republicans. Nevertheless, his vote was counted (though his registration was verified later).

Throw in the added confusion of if extra blank ballots could be given from one precinct to another, one chairman said no and they had to be confiscated while the other said it didn't matter, and you had a situation ripe for fraud if one wasn't already so confused.

But what about the 10 above-mentioned delegates?

Well, let's just say most of them will be in for a surprise a few weeks down the road. As our beleaguered chairman turned in his two ballots he happened to mention that his five allotted delegates had been used by another precinct that needed them. The party official looked confused, "What do you mean? You only had one."