News from the Nevada Democratic Caucuses Held on January 21, 2012

By Robert J. Kossack, Esq.

On Saturday, January 21, 2012, I went to one of the Nevada Democratic party caucuses. The one I went to was held in the Sierra Vista High School gymnasium about a half mile from my house in Rhodes Ranch. There were about 15 to 20 precincts represented at that one location. Other clusters of precincts met at other high schools and public facilities around the state. Registered Democrats living in any one of the precincts among those represented in the Sierra Vista High School gym, or anyone within one of those precincts who wanted to register as a Democrat right then and there outside the gym, could come in and spend about an hour of their time, maybe more if they had an active precinct, and participate in the Nevada Democratic caucus presidential candidate nomination process.

The head Democrat at the caucus was the site coordinator. He had arrived an hour before me with some staff members. I suspect the site coordinator spends a hundred times more time than I do on politics, the Democratic party and Obama’s reelection. By the time I arrived, a sign had already been posted outside the gym telling me I had arrived at the Democratic Caucus, and arrows pointed to where we Democrats were to proceed forward and enter the gym. Tables had already been set up with lists of registered voters where people would sign in to vote. When I arrived at my scheduled time, we were an hour away from admitting the voters, an hour and a half away from the opening speeches and two hours away from beginning the actual head count and vote.

My job was to be a precinct temporary chair, and I was to report to the site coordinator. I did that shortly after arriving when he asked if anyone had the packet for precinct 1327. Two days prior, I had gone through a two hour training program at the Nevada State Democratic Headquarters where we studied a booklet and were told what we needed to do to help out with the primary election process, and I left carrying a large envelope of materials which included copies of the precinct number I was to tape behind me in my corner of the gym to inform those voters living in precinct 1327 where they needed to meet with me to caucus and have their vote counted.

Once the caucuses began at 11:30 A.M., we first had to listen to the site coordinator read letters from Obama, Reid, Berkley, and Robert Lange. If you don’t recognize Lange’s name, he’s the Chair of the Nevada State Democratic Party. Some local candidates were introduced. Some woman spoke in favor of something to which I paid no attention. It was pretty much useless gab as we all waited to start voting.

The way it was suppose to work was first I was to count everyone who showed up in my precinct. In that regard, I couldn’t count myself because it really wasn’t my precinct. My precinct was voting at another high school about five miles further from my house, but the Democrats needed people willing to take the training and act as temporary chairs for precincts in which no one within the precinct had volunteered. They even had some diehard Democrats come in from California to serve as temporary chairs for some of those deadbeat precincts from whichno one had volunteered to be a temporary chair. By serving as a temporary chair for one of those precincts, I actually gave up being able to vote in my own precinct, and I could not be elected a delegate to the county convention which means I also cannot be a delegate to the state convention or the national convention. My sacrifice was supposedly so a number of other people could vote and participate in the system, at least that was the idea. Actually, if I bothered to know any of my neighbors, I could have asked someone in my precinct who went to the caucus at Spring Valley High School from my precinct to nominate me, but I don’t know any neighbors who are also Democrats who also went to the caucus.

Once I completed the head count, I had been trained to work through a formula to figure out how many votes each candidate needed for that candidate’s supporters to be able to elect a delegate or make their candidate “viable.” For precincts entitled to elect more than 4 delegates, a candidate needed 15 percent of the voters in the precinct to express their support for that candidate. I was figured that if half the people came as in 2008, then I would have about 70 voters in my precinct, and 11 voters would be needed to make a candidate viable since you round up to make for a half a person. (70 x 0.15 = 10.5 rounds up to 11.)

Precinct 1327 was one of the larger precincts, at least in terms of registered Democrats eligible to vote in that precinct, and it was eligible to elect as many as 15 delegates to the county convention. The precincts which set up next to me were only electing 7 or 9 delegates. Smalltimers, strictly small-timers. I had the big district, and I figured it was a good thing I wore my suit so the crowd would know who was in charge, that suit and the official looking Temporary Chair card I was wearing around my neck reminding me of my precinct number, the number of delegates it could elect, and on the back, the telephone number I needed to call to confirm when I arrived at the caucus and after the caucus to report the number of delegates elected for each candidate. Only us specially trained temporary chairs had the hanging tags and the other materials the caucus goers needed to have their vote counted. We also had other official looking stuff such as an agenda to post, a delegate calculation sheet to post, forms for people to use to sign up to be on the Clark County Democratic Committee, and a form to present a proposition to be considered for inclusion as a plank for the national party platform after the proposal had been screened by various layers of party bureaucracy and approved by the county and state conventions.

The booklet we were given at the State Democratic Headquarters suggested we temporary chairs bring with us a pocket calculator to do the math, a clock or watch to make sure we didn’t start the voting too early and stuff like extra pens, paper, markers and masking tape. I seemed to be the only person who brought his own masking tape, and it made me the center of attention until the voters started to arrive, that and the suit. I was the only one there in a suit.

It was a rainy, windy morning, and the winning candidate of the caucus was never in doubt. In Nevada, the Democrats who went to the caucus could either vote for Obama or vote for “uncommitted.” Even with nothing to little incentive to come to the caucus, the turn out was still very disappointing. Surprising disappointing compared with the madhouse four years ago. I only counted about 100 voters or maybe as few as five voters per precinct, in the entire gymnasium. Not a single voter showed up in my precinct. No one. I never got a chance to be elected precinctpermanent chair or show off my mastery of the mathematical formulas or read the antidiscrimination warnings prior to each vote or apply the double voting procedure designed to lessen discriminatory effect. To learn the latest voting technique designed to ease the effects of discrimination study the Democratic caucus voting rules. Democrats are always big on the discrimination stuff.

In the Las Vegas Review Journal the next day, Harry Reid was talking as if the Nevada Democratic caucuses had been a success even though only 12,600 voters showed up. Make that 12,601 to include me who showed up but could not vote. In 2008, more than 116,000 people had showed up, or more than 9 times as many people. In 2008, the Democrats actually registered 30,000 new voters, more than twice the total turnout this time around. Reid tried to throw a favorable light on the pathetic turnout by citing to 2004 when baby Bush was running for reelection, and only 3,000 Republicans turned out for the Nevada Republican caucus that year. So, looking at it that way, we had four times the turnout than did the Republicans under similar circumstances when there was no real contest and the final result was never in doubt.

The first thing we temporary chairs were suppose to do was nominate ourselves to be elected by his precinct caucus to the position of permanent chair. The Democrats always want to be fair, and they want you to be able to vote on everything, so even though only one person in each precinct had been trained to be the chair and only one person in each precinct was in possession of the voting materials, anyone could be elected chair. If by some chance some unexpected grassroots movement elected someone else chair of the precinct I had come to help, I was suppose to stick around and advise the chair about what they were suppose to do to have the delegates elected and to notify the party of the results.

So the idea was that I would become the permanent chair of the precinct in which I had come to help, the precinct which was filled to the brim with Democrats, but in which none of the precinct’s Democrats had the gumption to volunteer to help out the party, take a couple hours out of their day for the training and take on some responsibility to help run the caucus. Now, none of those deadbeats even came to vote on a rainy, windy day simply because they knew their vote didn’t matter anyway. Hey, we were suppose to rally the party. We were all suppose to come as a showing of unity, as a way of saying to the Republicans, “We don’t care who you put up against us. We’re coming to the fight.” Instead, we Democrats better hope the Democrats too lazy to come to the caucuses come out and vote in November. Learning the even more pathetic number of Republicans who went to their caucuses in 2004, give me some hope in that regard. In fact, you can say the Democrats are four times more likely to come just to say they showed up.

I also place the blame on the low turnout on that fact that it wasn’t well publicized. I read the newspaper every day, and I must have missed it, because just a week before the caucuses, I had to call down to the State Democratic Headquarters to find out the when and where. I had been called about two months earlier and asked if I planned to vote and whether I would volunteer to be a temporary chair. I said yes to both and then heard nothing until I call them back withing just five days of the vote. When I told them I volunteered and then heard nothing, they offered me times of three training sessions, and I went to the one on a Thursday night less than two days before the vote.

Being left to stand alone in front of my precinct sign in my corner of the gym with my only usefulness being my willingness to lend out my roll of masking tape, I wondered who lived in precinct 1327. Just who were those ingrates nervy enough to stand me up? Not that they knew I would be there, but would they have cared anyway? As it turns out, they all live in a few closely packed in housing subdivisions, and one cluster of condominiums, where everything has been built since 2003. All the homes have tile roofs, and they average about 1500 square feet of living space. Precinct 1327 is bordered on the north by Warm Springs, on the west by Jones, on the south by Robindale, and on the east by the railroad tracks. That’s where those deadbeat Democrats were all kicking back as I sat in a corner looking over a near vacant gym taking a little political smack with some of the other temporary chairs who were also stood up by their precincts as we enviously watched some of the other chairs organizing the voting in precincts where someone gave enough of a damn to come out and vote.

Statewide, only 1.7 percent of the delegates were elected as undecided. I sure wish I could have had some of those people in my precinct. A little action, a little political discourse, that’s why I had come. Four years ago the political discourse consisted of seventy people shouting O-ba-ma while another seventy people shouted back Hil-la-re. That kind of nonsense wasn’t going to occur in any precinct I ran. There was going to be some intelligent discussion of the issues with me being prepared to predict that by October 1, 2012, the Dow will be over 14,000 and the unemployment rate will be below 6.6 percent.

So in the end, I called in my vote count and worked my way through the voice menu, number of voters, zero, number of delegates for Obama, zero, number of delegates for undecided, zero, and I hung up, gave my sealed envelopes to the site coordinator to be delivered to the state party and the county party headquarters, each containing a copy of a single delegate slip with no name on it and only a message that no one cared to come to vote in precinct 1327. I then removed from the gym wall the precinct numbers and arrows and agenda and other stuff I had taped up and put it all back in the large envelope I had brought with me with high expectations of doing something worthwhile. I then went home to watch the election news for the Republican primary in South Carolina on MSNBC with the hope that the Republicans would keep fighting among themselves right up to a brokered convention.