Caucus Chaos
by Tom Epstein
While canvassing in Reno last week, I knocked on hundreds of doors and met dozens of Democrats. One told me he couldn’t caucus because his wife was in the hospital. Another had a new baby. Several needed to work on Saturday. Others simply had too many errands to run on their day off. Some were too old to leave the house for hours at a time. Many simply didn’t know anything about it. A few had cast ballots in the early voting period.
One thing they all had in common is that they wouldn’t participate in Nevada’s in-person presidential primary caucus. After observing the caucuses last Saturday, who could blame them?
I arrived around 9 a.m. at an elementary school where three precinct caucuses were scheduled to begin at noon. It was immediately apparent that trouble was brewing.
Only one Democratic Party volunteer at the site appeared to know the caucus rules — a conscientious and competent woman named Laurane. While the sign-in area was well organized, only Laurane could answer questions from caucus participants. Overwhelmed with inquiries and other pre-caucus tasks, she asked if I could put up the folding chairs that were on carts in the caucus room. (I did.)
Two caucuses were held in the school’s multipurpose room, while a third was in a hallway around the corner.
Some folks came more than an hour early to avoid long lines, but that proved unnecessary since only 77 local Democrats showed up. If they weren’t registered to vote, they could sign up and participate. A few did.
Since Laurane was busy at the sign-in table, I helped several caucusers identify their precinct number and directed them to either side of the main room or to the outside hallway to wait for the proceedings to begin. Among the caucusers I met was a young man who told me he drove in from northern California that morning. He lived mostly in the Bay Area but was registered to vote in Nevada and wasn’t going to miss his chance to caucus.
Participation by the campaigns was uneven. Bernie Sanders brought the largest contingent of precinct leaders and staff, while Warren, Buttigieg, and Steyer also had representatives. The Klobuchar and Biden campaigns had no volunteer staff onsite. An organizer for Steyer gave free t-shirts to people who caucused for them.
Once the caucuses started, I discovered that the two people helping Laurane to manage the scene were her elderly father and young adult daughter. Laurane and her father began the program with the two larger precincts in the main room while the hallway precinct was asked to wait until they were finished.
Laurane and her father explained the rules and read welcome letters from the Democratic governor and two senators, a courtesy that added 10 minutes to the proceedings. Laurane was much quicker to get through the preliminaries, so her precinct was the first to begin the actual caucusing process
They began by counting the total number of people in the precinct and recorded that number on a large paper grid. Next, the participants separated into different areas for each candidate and those preferences were reported. At that point, early votes were posted on the board and the early and in-person votes for each candidate were combined. There were 24 in-person caucusers and 66 early voters, for a total of 90 participants. In order to receive delegates, candidates must meet receive 15% of the vote.
In this precinct, only Bernie Sanders met the 15% threshold while five other candidates received between 7 and 12% of the combined votes. Then the chaos began.
Under party rules, caucusers were able to switch to another candidate when their first choice didn’t meet the 15% viability threshold. Supporters of the five below-threshold campaigns naturally wanted to see the second choice of the early voters so they could make an informed decision about whether to move to another candidate.
If the caucusers’ preferred candidate hit the 15% threshold when the second choices were counted, they would stick with them. If not, they might switch to another candidate who would be viable. They were informed, however, that the computer program mandated by the state party wouldn’t reveal the second choice of the early voters until the in-person caucusers had chosen whom to support on the second ballot.
Confused about the process, none of the people who had waited hours to participate wanted to abandon their first choice without knowing if the early voters’ second preference would make their candidate viable. They clearly didn’t comprehend that sticking with their first choice, as all but one person did, meant that Sanders would receive all the precinct’s delegates.
The people supporting a candidate other than Sanders never learned the second choice of the early voters and didn’t understand why they were denied this crucial information. Needless to say, most departed very frustrated.
This took nearly two hours, and now Laurane moved to the other caucus in the large room because her father wasn’t able to complete the process. In the meantime, this precinct had elected the young Californian I met earlier as their caucus leader. He had received no training prior to the caucus but was now leading the ballot count.
Strong willed and persistent, he pleaded with Laurane to accept the second choice of caucus attendees who filled out their ballots but then left the premises. After several calls to the state headquarters lawyers, they overruled the caucus leader, consuming another half hour.
The outcome was exactly the same as in the first precinct. Though Sanders received fewer than half the votes in the first ballot, none of the other candidates hit 15% and no in-person caucusers changed their choice, so he won all the delegates. After almost four hours, a handful of caucus participants were still around to see that all their effort resulted in no delegates for their preferred candidates.
While all this was going on, nearly three hours into the caucus process, the hallway precinct finally got Laurane’s attention. Nine people had stayed to participate. A mother who brought two young children had given up and gone home.
After going through the preliminaries, it was déjà vu all over again. Only Sanders met the threshold, the others didn’t change their votes and never learned about the second choices made by the early voters, so Sanders won all the delegates.
Despite a first-rate leader in Laurane, the outcome was a disaster for the participants and democracy in general. Dozens of loyal Democrats killed an afternoon and left exasperated. The second choice of early voters was never part of the process. Sanders got 100% of the delegates despite winning the support of only half the people who voted early or participated in person.
This was not an isolated outcome. Statewide, Sanders won 34% of the popular vote but received 47% of the delegates. The 15% threshold accounts for some of this discrepancy, but not nearly all of it.
Combined with the Iowa debacle, the Nevada process should represent the death knell for presidential caucuses. While permitting early voting for the caucus was well intentioned and may have increased turnout, it resulted in an outcome that confused in-person participants, nullified the second choice of early voters and warped the reported vote count. As an exclamation point, a New York Times review of the final vote totals revealed errors in at least nine percent of the precinct caucus results.
Given the stakes of this presidential election and the disproportionate impact of the early contests, having two flawed caucuses among the first three states has gravely undermined the nominating process. This should never happen again.
So what should Democrats do? It’s probably not possible to devise a perfect process that is fair to every candidate and voter, but we can and must do better. I’ll offer a few suggestions.
Obviously, eliminate caucuses and make it as easy as possible to vote through mail-in ballots, early voting, and same-day registration.
To empower supporters of candidates who fall below the 15% threshold, ranked choice voting should be employed to enable those voters to have a say in the allocation of delegates.
Lesser known candidates need a chance to break out, so continuing the tradition of sequencing individual elections in small and medium-sized states makes sense. Rather than leading with two mostly white states, however, choose four states from different regions that represent the diversity of the party. And ideally, the early primaries should be held in states that are often general election battlegrounds so the candidates’ grassroots organizing pays off in November.
