Caucus Training

[kevin_standlee]

I have volunteered to work with the Nevada Democratic Party for the 2020 Nevada Caucuses ("First in the West"). The 2016 Caucus was a bit of a mess, and the party is working to try and not repeat mistakes made last time around. For example, There will be early voting the week before the caucus, so that the preferences of party members who cannot attend the actual caucus can be recorded. They'll even be using a preferential (instant-runoff) ballot, which of course I am very familiar because that's what we use for the Hugo Awards and Worldcon/Westercon site selection. I've already completed a couple of online training classes that are prerequisites for working on caucus day, and today was the first of two "volunteer summits" where we'd get the rest of the orientation for the big day next month.



I got to the Washoe County/Nevada State Democratic Party headquarters office in Reno about 30 minutes before the scheduled start time, and I'm glad I didn't arrive any later, as it appears a lot more people turned up than originally expected, and there were only two computers in their registration area. We started an hour late because they did need to get everyone into the computers. That's because at the end of the course we were sent links to the online applications we will need to do our jobs on caucus day. (There are paper records that are the official record of the caucus, but having the online applications speeds up counting and reporting.)

Although there were (barely) enough chairs, I would have to say that there really wasn't enough room to do this training comfortably. We were split into four roughly equal-sized groups, and the trainers rotated between the groups. The organizers told me that for the second and final session (for those people who couldn't make this one), they are going to scout around to try and get a bigger room.



After several hours of breakout sessions and then a final general session where they worked us through the process of loading the caucus app onto our smartphones (it's not just something that you download from the App Store), we were issued our training certificates, thanked for volunteering, and sent on our way around 6 PM, a bit over four hours after I arrived. I'd planned to do several errands in Reno after the training, but it was too late to get to Staples, so I just went to Winco foods for some groceries that Lisa asked me to pick up on the way home.

I've volunteered to be a "Temporary Precinct Chair" (in nearly all cases, the TPC is elected the Permanent Chair by acclamation, mainly because hardly anyone else wants to do the work). I was fortunate in that nobody had yet applied to be the TPC for Lyon County precinct 40, where I live, so I get to chair my local precinct. Now according to the records I looked up, there are only about 250 Democrats registered for my precinct, and in 2016, only 30 of us showed up in person. This time around, those of us who attend on February 22 will be added to those who vote in advance to determine our allocation of delegates to the county convention on April 18. The county convention will then elect delegates to the state convention, which in turn will determine the Nevada delegation going to Milwaukee WI in July.

I volunteered this year because it seemed to me that last time around, our TPC was not really confident about the caucus process. I understand it, and also this time they've made it easier and given us a better outline to follow. On the other hand, as the Precinct Chair, it turns out that it's more difficult for me to be selected as a delegate to the county convention, which I'd like to try to do again as I did in 2016. (I'm not that interested in the state or national conventions; Westercon and Worldcon have too much call on my time.) However, even if I only put in the several hours in February to help keep my little corner of one county organized, I feel like I'm doing my part to help the process along.

Comments

[jreynoldsward]

Good for you. As a former Democratic Party activist in a non-caucus state, I'm fascinated by the process (even though I firmly believe it should be replaced by primaries for representation purposes). They need someone experienced, and if fandom isn't appropriate preparation, I don't know what is.

[kevin_standlee]

Thank you! As it happens, I don't like the caucus process myself, but the changes this time around have not only made it closer to a primary (because you don't have to go to the caucus to vote, but can vote early at a central location, just like a primary), but also because they are using instant-runoff voting, which I consider a much better system than first-past-the-post in any more-than-two candidate election.

As I said to my fellow volunteers yesterday, "The perfect is the enemy of the good enough for now" and reminded them that even if they don't get their first choice, it's incumbent upon all of us to support the final selection. We simply don't have the luxury of "protest votes" or "sitting it out," because it's pretty clear that Tumpists won't stay away, and thus a vote for anyone other than the Democratic party candidate (including not voting at all) amounts to a vote for the Orange One.

[delosharriman]

I'm curious to know what you think is the argument in favour of the primary-election system. From what I can tell, it seems to lend itself to what some might call the "hijacking" of a party — in other words, the scenario in which an individual candidate with a modest-sized but devoted following can effectively gain control of the party apparatus and dictate the platform or manifesto. A consistent set of principles or sense of identity, which is the concept I associate with a political party, seems very difficult to achieve. Not that I am saying that there should not be change, but I shuld think it better for that change to be gradual and based on consensus of people who have been affiliated with the party for a long time, rather than brought on by the irruption of new people.

[jreynoldsward]

Caucuses are influenced by a.)who can be present (although as Kevin points out Nevada has modified that), b.) those who are system-savvy, and c.) are open to influence and intimidation that is not present in a secret ballot. The drawback you point out--that of an individual candidate with a modest but devoted following--is much more likely to happen within a caucus than a closed primary election (i.e., an election which is only open to declared party members and does not allow for people to change parties to vote in a different party the day of the election. I do not support open primaries because they are not representative of the party).

For the record, the primary system was developed in order to circumvent backroom manipulation by party leadership within the caucus system. This cut out all but the most privileged. As it is now, caucuses bias toward those who are not working on that day, who have the privilege of time to attend, and who have the ability to be present. IOW, caucuses trend toward the motivated, those who can be recruited/paid to be there, and the upper classes. Primaries are much more representative of ALL the members of a political party than caucuses are.

Also note that my undergraduate degree is in political science with an emphasis on electoral politics. Besides personal experience I have the training to back my informed opinion.

[delosharriman]

What you seem to be saying — pardon me — is that you consider democracy of process to be a paramount good. I would tend to identify at least three things as more important, on the ground that, if they are not present as preconditions, democracy either fails to create a consensus of legitimacy, or becomes an absolute horror (as van Loon observed, really thorough-going repression is less likely under an autocratic than a democratic tyranny, simply because the functionaries of the former sort of regime are less likely to be filled with zeal — compare Czarist Russia with the early USSR, for instance). These are :

• Rule of law
  
• The public peace
  
• Protection of minorities

So the question, or perhaps meta-question, which concerns me more than "is this process more democratic?" is "does this process give the better outcomes?" And, obviously, if what you value is democracy of representation, you will give the automatic "yes". But do we really have confidence in the statement that the primary-election candidate is more likely, for instance, to respect the three pillars which I have set up above, than the smoke-filled back-room candidate?

A related, often-discussed problem is that of the kind of people who are willing to put themselves through the electoral process as candidates in the first place, & the skill set they bring with them. I recall reading, in the memoirs of Elihu Root, the explicit statement that, if popular election of Senators had been in effect at that time, he would never have for a moment considered becoming one. Certainly the old process of election of Senators saddled the country with some real stinkers, but the new process does that pretty efficiently as well, & (beyond the extent to which it excludes people who might serve well, which is difficult to say anything definitely meaningful about) it also tends to make the Senators we get homogeneous. If you look at the Congress as a whole (and much the same applies to the State Legislatures), we have 500-odd student body presidents.

What may be worse than that, in my opinion, is that, in general, the skill set they possess is the one they value. They surround themselves with people like themselves, & listen to the opinions of people like themselves. This gives rise to a problem which I regard as extremely serious, insofar as the same people are charged with establishing the "will of the People" in terms of the objectives of public policy — which is where I see the value of democratic process to primarily lie, in terms of decision-making (separate from the establishment of legitimacy) — and the means by which those objectives are to be pursued. And since those people have no subject-matter knowledge, & frequently no respect for those who do, the implementation is either a total mess, or dictated by outside lobbyists. Frequently both. The "Clean Power Plan" put forward by the Obama EPA was an interesting example : the accounting rules failed to average in existing emissions-free hydro & nuclear correctly, so that replacing them by gas-fired generation was counted as an emissions reduction in the overall mix.

[jreynoldsward]

My dear, let me repeat what I said above, with emphasis.

The primary election was developed as a response to actual corruption within the system.

We are talking about the era of the Gilded Age where those senators brought forth from the smoke-filled caucus rooms were owned by monopolies. Railroad barons, timber barons, and so on, in an era that was still more unequal than our current one (though we're starting to catch up.

Additionally, you're damn right I value democracy of process to be a paramount good. For right or wrong, it is the voice of the people and the consent of the governed. Democracy of process is what differentiates a republic from a dictatorship. It is possible to achieve the rule of law, public peace, and protection of minorities under a dictatorship. It is possible to achieve so-called better outcomes under repressive rule.

What you are advocating is rule by the Elite Who Know Better, and that, my dear, is not a democracy or a republic.