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Democracy in action
Feb. 5th, 2008 08:58 pmCan I just tell you how unique-and-speshul-snowflaky the Colorado caucus system is?
Colorado gets nostalgic for holding caucuses from time to time, and this was one of the times. So instead of going to a nice voting booth sometime during the day or evening and flipping a switch, we have to assemble as a group of like-minded neighbors and do it all together, publicly. In our precinct, 64 people showed up (a record, but I don't know how many are in the precinct all told), and we were crowded into a public school library. Then we got read a bunch of rules, had a straw man vote, and a final vote for our candidate of choice. Next, a subset of each candidate's supporters - by relative percentage - gets elected to the county level, where they'll do the same thing, then on to the state. We also were presented with three positions to support or not - one was whether or not to encourage impeachment of GWB and Cheney. That one actually caused a lot of debate but was voted down (not that we didn't have fantasies of it happening for a moment or two, but the pragmatists among the group held sway).
It took us about 2 hours start to finish, including trying to find a parking spot in the mass of humanity. There were other precincts having caucuses there, as well as the other party's precincts.
If our area is any indication, a lot of people came to their local caucuses tonight, most of them for the first time ever. The election itself is going to be a madhouse at this rate, but luckily Colorado has unlimited absentee ballots, so I'll vote at my dining room table, thank you very much. (We need extra time because we always have a fuckton of ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments to decide, too).
So my take: interesting. I'd rather flip the switch in private, though.
Colorado gets nostalgic for holding caucuses from time to time, and this was one of the times. So instead of going to a nice voting booth sometime during the day or evening and flipping a switch, we have to assemble as a group of like-minded neighbors and do it all together, publicly. In our precinct, 64 people showed up (a record, but I don't know how many are in the precinct all told), and we were crowded into a public school library. Then we got read a bunch of rules, had a straw man vote, and a final vote for our candidate of choice. Next, a subset of each candidate's supporters - by relative percentage - gets elected to the county level, where they'll do the same thing, then on to the state. We also were presented with three positions to support or not - one was whether or not to encourage impeachment of GWB and Cheney. That one actually caused a lot of debate but was voted down (not that we didn't have fantasies of it happening for a moment or two, but the pragmatists among the group held sway).
It took us about 2 hours start to finish, including trying to find a parking spot in the mass of humanity. There were other precincts having caucuses there, as well as the other party's precincts.
If our area is any indication, a lot of people came to their local caucuses tonight, most of them for the first time ever. The election itself is going to be a madhouse at this rate, but luckily Colorado has unlimited absentee ballots, so I'll vote at my dining room table, thank you very much. (We need extra time because we always have a fuckton of ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments to decide, too).
So my take: interesting. I'd rather flip the switch in private, though.
