Democracy in action

[geoviki]

Can 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.

Comments

[secretsolitaire.livejournal.com]

Honestly, the whole election process is bizarre, nonsensical and frankly unfair in about a million ways. I don't know how we elect the leader of the free world this way!

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Aw, I kind of like caucuses. It's like a Tupperware party.

Did you not have a poll for Mark Udall vs. The Guy Running Against Udall? And you only had three resolutions? We had one that had been submitted ahead of time, but our caucus was speshul and we came up with four more.

Then we went down to Carver's for beers.

[aliciajd]

We're having our first caucus this Saturday in Nebraska. It promises to be mass confusion.

[parthenia14.livejournal.com]

Good grief. No one would turn up if they did that here.

[spark-of-chaos.livejournal.com]

I've had the whole voting system explained to me at least twice and by two different people too, and I still have no idea what the blokes on CNN are blathering on about. :blush: We have low voting numbers and our voting takes about twenty minutes tops of your Sunday morning. I image how much lower we'd go it it were a year-long procedure...

[frayach-nicuill.livejournal.com]

Intriguing! I'm glad you explained this because I've never lived in a caucus state and never quite understood how it works. It sounds kind of fun, actually (although also kind of annoying if you're pressed for time ). How did you 64 people "find" each other? Are you just supposed to show up at a particular place at a particular time if you support a particular candidate?