I have a problem with it on two folds. The biggest gripe I have is that most people just didn’t know about the caucus and even when they did it’s near impossible to get people to turn out to a polling location twice in the same day. It almost seems anti-democratic to allow people to vote and then almost in an almost clandestine way have a caucus where a fraction of the people who voted previously get to decide on a third of the delegates. Wasn’t this country based on 1 person, 1 vote? And yet here we are giving some people 2 votes in the same primary. I think it’s unfair to the working men and women who left home early or took time off of work to vote in the first place and then expect them to be able to leave their families and return at 7 pm that night to caucus. Texas needs to pick one style of primary and stick with it, either a popular vote or a caucus but not both.
What really ticked me off is how unofficial the caucus was compared to the popular vote. The biggest issues I have with elections, especially since the hanging chad incident in Florida, is that all votes cast need to be accounted for in a fair and orderly fashion. When I voted a week ago during Texas’ early voting period I was very impressed. The polling location had computers with all registers voters names in it. A registered voter could bring in their voter registration card or a state issued photo identification card and have their id and voter status verified immediately. Then voters were directed to a private voting booth where they could vote electronically for the candidate of their choice. Everything seemed very legitimate and official, which I found very comforting since we were voting for a candidate to be the next President of the United States.
When it came time to caucus though, I had the complete opposite feeling. I know the informal nature of the experience is what caucusing is all about, but something just felt fishy about it. Especially when, because of the format, it could have been extremely easy for someone to artificially increase a precinct’s turn out. In fact, the people signing constituents in had absolutely no idea what they were doing or how to do their job. It really discouraged me when I went to sign in and ended up knowing more about what was going and what I needed to do than the gentlemen stationed at the sign in table. Also, there is was no way to check a voter’s information in a timely fashion since everyone filled in their personal information by hand, including voter id number, on page after page of generic caucus forms. To me this seems like a very unnecessary and drawn out process that could take days to be verified and become official.
I for one think both candidates would be better served if all delegates were assigned based on the popular vote, especially when tens of thousands of more Texans turned out for the popular vote than the relatively small amount who participated in the caucus last night. It is times like these, when an election is so close and every delegate matters, that I realize the problems that still exist in our country’s voting process. You’d have thought that after all of these elections, especially after the Presidential election of 2000, that things would have been straightened out by now. Yet here we are again…it just goes to show that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
