Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Lisa and I cast our 2024 General Election votes on Saturday. We typically vote by mail, but the recent ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that declares that ballots cast by mail and postmarked before election day but received after that date are invalid, regardless of state law on the matter, are invalid makes us nervous, even though it should not take more than a couple of days for mail to get from Fernley to Yerrington (the county seat). My thought on the court ruling is "So much for states' rights." And I'm certain that the Trumpist Party will try to use that to overturn the results if they aren't what they want, so the election will end up at the Supreme Court.

Anyway, we went over to City Hall, where there was a long queue for the voting machines, but no wait to drop our ballots in the drop-box there. That should, as far as we can tell, avoid the "postmark" issue.

There were many down-ticket races in which I did not cast any vote, because the only candidate was a Republican, and those races aren't those covered by the ability to mark NONE OF THESE CANDIDATES, which is a possibility in Nevada. (It's only symbolic, as shown when NOTC won the race for the Democratic nomination for Lt. Governor a few elections ago; in such a case, the runner up gets the nod.)

I suppose I should thank the people trying to make sure that only Real Human Beings (i.e. Trumpists) sent out a "Vote for Patriots" recommendation list. These are people trying to stack the school board with MAGA loyalists. I'm surprised there are any women on their list; I though women were supposed to stay home and they shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway. But in any event, their endorsement list in a non-partisan race made is much easier for me to vote: I voted for the other candidates in that race. Now it's only a matter of degree when voting in a county that is around 80% Republican, presumably mostly Trumpists who are convinced that the Leopards would never eat their faces, but I reckon I can vote for the lesser evil in this case. Similarly, there isn't even a Democratic candidate for my member of Congress, and the No Party Preference candidate on the ballot is a former Republican, but he seems to be one of those people who says that the party left him, not the other way around, and it's slightly less bad.

There's one state ballot measure in which I have a great interest, and that is Question 3, which would establish ranked-choice (Instant Runoff) voting in most raced. (Not for President, unfortunately.) I note that both major parties oppose it, which doesn't surprise me at all, as RCV/IRV reduces party power and tends to return the least-disliked candidate rather than the most-liked, and based on how I see it work with the Hugo Awards, that's a good thing.

Nevada is apparently a battleground state. If you colored the map by county, you'd think it was a 98% Republican landslide state, but fortunately, land doesn't vote; people do. We've done what we can. I hope enough people who want to be able to hold a free election four years from now also vote this year.

I didn't get to sleep in that much because I wanted to get breakfast at the Wigwam before heading off to volunteer at the 2020 Nevada Democratic caucus, where I was a precinct chair. Lisa decided to join me at breakfast (she's rarely awake at that time), but because she's a registered independent, she couldn't participate in the caucus.

( Chair, Not Captain )

After my experience four years ago, I volunteered to help with the 2020 caucus because I was not all that pleased with the organization of the event. I don't mean the results — I mean the logistics and management of the event. After participating in initial online "Caucus 101" training and subsequent in-person training, I applied for the Temporary Precinct Chair appointment for Precinct 40, which is where I live in Fernley. (Lyon County is divided into forty precincts, of which mine is the northernmost.)

( Why 'Temporary'? )

According to the instructions we received, TPCs were asked to arrive at East Valley Elementary School by 8 AM, with the Site Lead (in charge of overall organization) arriving at 7:30. I therefore arrived about 7:45. To my surprise, I was the first person there except for the custodian at the school who had opened the building and was wondering where the organizers were. I later learned that there was a big traffic accident in Reno/Sparks on eastbound I-80, and therefore our site lead, who was responsible for transporting the caucus materials from the party headquarters near Reno Airport, had gotten stuck in traffic.

Other TPCs began to filter in along with a few other volunteers as well as precinct captains (see my note above) and other partisan organizers, and we took it upon ourselves to start doing some basic physical arrangement of the school's multi-purpose room prior to the site lead's arrival. The custodian showed us where the racks of folding chairs were and she told us we could roll the racks in to the hall, which we did. We unloaded two full racks and put a third rack on standby. We weren't sure how many people would be here compared to four years ago. While interest in the caucus is much higher this time, especially with so many remaining candidates still in the race, the introduction of early voting was a wild card.

( How SF Conrunning Skills Helped the Nevada Caucus )

After completing check-in and precinct chair briefing, the Site Lead got everyone's attention, thanked everyone for their patience and for coming, and started reading letters from senior Nevada elected officals, starting with governor Steve Sisolak. After he finished, I offered to read the letter from Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto. Our site lead read the letter from Senator Jackie Rosen (he works for her office), and the other PCs read letters from Nevada's three Democratic members of Congress.

With the pep rally portion done, the Precinct Chairs went to our precincts and called them individually to order. I banged my gavel, introduced myself, and started reading from the scripts provided to us by the Nevada Democratic Party. Rather than go through the process of ayes and nays for what is generally a routine item, I asked if there was any objection to me serving as Permanent Chair. There was none. I asked for and recieved a volunteer to act as Precinct Secretary. I'm grateful for her help, because while she wrote the results of intermediate counts, I had to either enter them into the iPad or read off the results we got from the iPad.

The way the caucus works is that initially everyone in the caucus forms an "initial alignment" of their most-preferred candidate. After the first round, only "viable" candidates survive. Viability depends on the size of the precinct. Our precinct was to elect five delegates to the county convention in April, and thus viablity meant you had to poll at least 15% of the total votes cast, including early votes.

After entering the in-person voters on the paper sheet and the iPad, I used the iPad to retrieve the results of the advance voting. Had the iPad malfunctioned, we also had the advance voting results on paper, but all seven iPads worked as advertised. There were a total of 29 people (in person and advance) voting in our precinct (about a 15% turnout, I think), and thus viability was 29 * 0.15 = 4.35, with all fractions rounded up, and thus viability required at least 5 votes.

( Chasing Viability and Cutting the Cards )

I and the other precinct chairs started cleaning up our paperwork, putting forms in the correct envelopes, and tidying up generally. We asked those people who hadn't immediately run for the exits as soon as final alignments had been reached to help fold and store chairs and tables, take down signs, and clean up the room.

We invited anyone who wanted to do so to take pictures of the posters and final precinct counts. I was so busy that I did not get a picture of any other precinct but our neighboring 39.

The base instructions said that the precinct chairs were supposed to both phone in and e-mail pictures of our precincts to party HQ, but the site lead offered to do all of them, so we brought all seven sets of paperwork to him, he reviewed it, took the pictures, sent the e-mails, made the calls, and would later after we finsished cleaning up transport the original documents including the voter cards back to party headquarters in Reno.

During this time I had to divert from my main task of clean-up (mostly done anyway) to help one of our precinct's voters, who was experiencing both physical (from too much standing) and emotional (from having her first preference get elimintated) pain. I retrieved a chair from one of the racks and sat with her while she poured out her frustration. I also loaned her my phone so she could call her son to come get her. When she felt able to walk again, I helped her outside, with her holding my right arm while I carried a chair in my left as we went out to the curb. I set the chair up for her and continued to stay with her and listen to her until her son came. (Besides just being a good person, this sort of thing is part of what we should live when we say we want to hold an accessible and inclusive caucus respectful of all of our members.) I of course returned the chair. I do wish I'd been able to go grab my Jacaru hat, as it was surprisingly sunny and I got even redder than usual, especially on the top of my head.

After helping the site lead move boxes to his car, we made one final pass through the room, where I took down a couple of stray signs we'd left behind. Note to self: if I do this again, bring a roll of blue tape, as the masking tape supplied by the party was poor quality and hard to use and you shouldn't use ordinary masking tape on the painted surfaces anyway. One final task: I helped the custodian reset some of the tables to the way they will be used on Monday morning so that she could finish her work and go home.

And then we really were done, about 3 PM. Not counting the custodian who unlocked and locked the building, I ended up being the first person in and the last person out. That does remind me of a number of fannish functions on which I've volunteered.

This caucus did go much more smoothly than the one four years ago, and I think the advance voting made a big difference. The "caucus calculator" on the iPads worked, and it made the counting easier, and we never had to go to the backup plans, but I'm still glad that it wasn't the only way we could have done the election. It still could have gone better. Even though it means I'd have to be up even earlier to make two trips back and forth to Reno, I'm tempted to volunteer to be a site lead. Having seen how it works, it doesn't seem any more complicated than a lot of the conventions on which I have worked.

I'm tired from the long day, but I'm very satisfied with the results organizationally, even if my first choice candidate did not make the cut in my precinct. I'm glad that I was able to lend my organizational skills to it, and I got a lot of thanks from many people including the site lead, my fellow PCs, and lots of the voters. Go Precinct 40!

Tomorrow is the primary election in Nevada. I confirmed that I should be able to see the results on the Silver State Election site. It only displays the top two candidates, so the only way to see everyone is to expand the details. To my surprise, I'm the only one of the seven candidates who bothered to send a picture to the Secretary of State's office to appear with my results.

During the past week, one more election sign for the Fire Board has appeared, promoting two other candidates. That's about all I've seen. I also filed my second financial disclosure form, but this one was easy because I haven't spent anything since the initial expenditure for the two signs and the plywood on which to mount them, and that was on the first report, so this was just certifying that I'd spent nothing else.

Because of my Day Jobbe schedule, I can't stay up tomorrow night worrying about results. (Indeed, while working down here in the Bay Area, I have to get up even earlier in order to get to the showers available at one of the buildings. I don't use the RV's shower because it's too small and too hard to use, and wouldn't save me that much time anyway.) It will have to wait until I get to work on Wednesday morning to find out whether I survived to make the final four.

This afternoon, between coming back from breakfast and going to have my hair cut, I worked out my campaign site for the North Lyon County FPD seat. Inasmuch as I don't want to spend any money on this and because I think it's about the right speed for Fernley, I created a Facebook page. As far as I can tell, you do not need to have a Facebook account or be signed in to see

Kevin Standlee for Fire Board

I also used some of the material from the site to create a flyer that I took with me to the get my hair cut at A Little Off The Top. The proprietor let me put one of my flyers in her window, which was nice of her.

Next I need to print some business cards with my picture and a pointer to the web site, so I can hand them out to people. Apparently, I'm visible enough with my habit of walking around downtown for my health that just being able to put a name to the face (and the hat) should be helpful.