vote quimby

I used to vote for people of all political parties, but a few years ago I finally swore off Republicans. I haven't gone that far yet with "the other party", but I certainly don't consider myself a Democrat. Still, I want to vote for Obama in the next election and I figured I had to vote in the caucus to make that possibility into a reality. So I went with one of my roommates to the local DFL (Democrats, Farmers, and Labor, for you non-Minnesotans) caucus. For those who are interested, joshuwain  (my roommate) posted his DFL experience here and dodecadragon  posted his Republican experience here.

At sign-in, I just wrote my name, signature, and address in a big sheet with no verbiage that I noticed. (Later, we were read a statement that it meant we were Democrats now. Doh!) I picked up my caucus agenda sheet that explained the timeline and caucus rules for nominations (2 rules) and motions/resolutions (4 rules). Very helpful information for someone who hadn' t been there before. Then I got a small piece of paper with presidential candidates listed. I put a check next to Obama and then dropped it into a large envelope.

The rest of it was professionally done, although we were very short on people who were willing to donate their time to the cause.  Supposedly the police showed up because there were so many people.  We ran out of chairs, signup forms, and ballots very quickly.  Apparently there were a LOT of people like me there who were only interested in getting a particular person on the ballot and not really interested in the party itself. We also got several resolutions passed for our precinct. One of them was my suggestion that all voting in general elections be done by instant runoff voting. (It passed with 2 against and 1 abstention.)

When the totals came back for the presidential nominee for our precinct, the results were impressive. joshuwain said that 2 years ago, there were only 16 people at the caucus for our precinct. Here are the results for the caucus this year:

• John Edwards, 1
• Hillary Clinton, 36
• Barack Obama, 74

So hopefully I'll get to vote for Obama in the presidential election of 2008.  If it's Clinton, though... I'll probably end up voting for the Green Party candidate.  And if the DFLers start sending me propaganda (because of my participation in their caucus), I'll probably have to send them a letter explaining that I resign from the party.  I still don't want to be a member of any political party.