How the 2016 Minnesota Caucuses Worked [View all]

[MineralMan]

Never mind the confusion, the crowding and the lack of proper organization. We had all of those, in spades.

I was a precinct caucus chair and convener in 2016. The organizers underestimated the turnout, and put two precincts in the same classroom, which was not large enough even for one, but we crowded everyone in. I was the convener for my precinct, and was elected as caucus chair. The other precinct elected a caucus chair, who was also the convener. That's normal.

There's a lot of preliminary stuff that goes on before the actual vote. Since I had done all that before, I did it for both precincts together, since the other convener had never done it and because there was no training. So, I ran through all of the routine stuff for both precincts. Once that was out of the way, it was time for the voting. There was other caucus business, like choosing delegates for the district convention, but the voting came first.

Ballots? We were supposed to have printed ballots, but there were none in the convener's packet. I asked about that and the ward chairman said they hadn't been delivered to the caucus location. So, I pulled some blank typing paper out of the teacher's desk in the classroom very early and enlisted someone to fold and tear it all into four pieces of paper. Those would be our ballots. People had to write the name of the candidate on that piece of paper, fold it, and put it into a paper bag on the desk.

We divided the room into two groups, one for each precinct and I explained the voting process. Fortunately, there were enough pens floating around the room to allow everyone to write their choice on the paper. One precinct's caucusers had one bag and the other precinct had its own bag. Who knows which bag the ballots went in. We asked people to put the ballots in their precinct's bag. That's the best we could do. I was so busy that I forgot to even mark a ballot myself.

We had elected two pairs of ballot tellers and two checkers for the two precincts earlier in the business meeting of the caucus. So, the voting happened, the ballots went into the bags and the counting happened. One counter read the ballot, and the other tallied the votes on a sheet of paper. I had to show our counter how to tally, using the four line and slash method. The ballots were counted twice, after switching the teller and the tallier. Fortunately the counts balanced. The checkers observed, to make sure everything was done properly.

Then, I filled out the official results form with the numbers we had tallied and hand carried it in a sealed envelope, which also held all of the ballots, to the ward chair's desk. Then I returned to an almost empty caucus room and we had the delegate election. Almost everyone left immediately after marking their ballots, so everyone who wanted to be a delegate was a delegate. And that was that.

The ward chair delivered the results to the district chair and they were checked and recorded and called into to the state party headquarters. And the 2016 caucus was over. Results were available by midnight. All done on paper.

Amateur night? Yes, indeed. But it all worked out, was fairly counted, and the results were available. The same thing happened all across the state, and the results were out by midnight. No apps. No cell phones. No nothing. Just paper and people.

It worked in Minnesota, chaotic as it was. The same system could have worked in Iowa. But it didn't.