I'm getting a headache and I don't know if I want to go into politics anymore.
Is it true we really can't get anything accomplished without hours upon hours of political language and excessive amounts of ballot casting? Now, I think this process would have been literally twice as fast if we had a little bit of technology. I mean beyond the low resolution projectors and microphones. We need something like the clickers from college, something where you can immediately cast a ballot and have it counted and the results can be tallied in as little as thirty seconds, give or take three minutes for all the people still trying to figure it out. We were using paper ballots. We wrote on them with a pen and passed them toward one end of the aisle.
Does that not seem rather archaic to you? I mean, granted, you need money for technology. But clickers in college are like sixty bucks per person. I'm only twenty short.
But here I am, hopeful alternate with forty bucks in my pocket, thinking they won't need me.
I wasn't one of the original delegates, or even alternates, and I missed the Polk county convention, which people generally agreed was a disaster. I became an alternate because there is something that allows everyone in the Polk County Central Committee to be an alternate delegate. It makes sense; we were all probably elected at the same time and by the same people to represent as the original delegates. I didn't think I would be an actual delegate because they randomly assign you a number that determines in what order you are allowed to become a delegate. I was 171 out of 300+. However, I don't think there was much more than twenty alternates for Polk county who showed up, and I have no idea how many delegates didn't show up. I just know that someone from the Polk County Convention started walking along being like, "Are you from Polk? Go get your ballots." They only give ballots to actual delegates. But be careful. Alternates don't have to pay the fee. Delegates do. You know what that means? Those are forty dollar ballots. You wouldn't think it, would you? Looking at those pastel colors and that cheap staple.
[Covering up the name cause they gave me a delegate nametag to prove I was one... but it wasn't mine.]
But whatever. By the time I got to the floor, some damage had already been done. They voted to change a rule allowing the people with the most ballots to win to a rule that says the people have to have 51% of the ballots to win. Not a big difference, you think? Add some rhetoric to make it sound like they won't represent you if you didn't vote for them?
By the end, people were voting to suspend that rule just to let others win so we didn't have to vote again. It wasn't clear that you had to keep voting until you got a winner. So say eight people run for four slots. Everyone can put four names on their ballot. Two people are popular and win with over 51% of the vote. Instead of the two right under them being in the other two spots, everyone else is declared a loser and we have to vote again on those two spots. The two with the least votes are then dropped from the ballot and we now have four people for two spots. Then we vote again. What really bothers me is that instead us actually getting a majority, we just keep cycling the people and eliminating the lowest until we're all forced to vote for the same people. Is that really agreement? I don't know.
But, I think Ron Paul came out ahead. I found some people from the Ron Paul camp beforehand, and we clustered to get instructions. Afterward, I met some more Ron Paul people, probably some of the youngest people in the room aside from the junior delegates. It's my job to try and get to the next meeting of the district convention to decide who goes to state or national or something like that.
It's really weird to think about. We voted in caucuses back in January. I believe that after recount, Santorum won. But now Santorum has dropped out. And even though all those people voted for Santorum, the delegates never even got all the way up to the top.. What happens to them? I guess they vote for someone else. So even though Santorum won Iowa, he now has nothing here, but they aren't just dead votes.
Did you know the average age of the Republican voter is 65? One guy is like, "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be out working to pay my social security?" People asked my age and when I told them, they're all like, "Oh good for you!" being all happy that someone that young was at a Republican convention.
But, like me and another Ron Paul supporter shared conspiratorially... we're not really Republicans.
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