I was an delegate and Mom was an alternate, who was upgraded to delegate, at our county convention yesterday. It was a mess, a total mess.
First off, we all had to sign in, be certified as delegate, alternate, whatever...also we had to sign our candidate preference. OK, fine, so they should have known with 15 minutes after registration how many delegates and alternates from each precinct and what candidate preferences were present, and which alternate needed to be re-seated as delegates. It took an hour and a half.
Then we got a "the Dem party in our county need $$$" speech, then a couple of local candidates spoke, then it was lunch time. According to the agenda we should already have held our precinct elections for our respective State delegates by that time.
Now, our precinct was lucky, we had enough delegates that we weren't combined with other precincts for voting. Overall our county was about 52% Obama, 48% Hillary. Our precinct delegates present were 9 Hillary and 6 Obama. But we had to elect a delegate and alternate to state. The rules were that whoever got the most votes was delegate, and whoever got the next number was alternate...we did not vote for delegate, then vote again for alternate. It was first place delegate, 2nd place alternate. So naturally we had a Clinton delegate and Obama alternate.
Many precinct were not large enough to elect a delegate, so they were combined with their neighboring larger precincts. Which then led to 18 Obama delegates and 4 Clinton delegates overall, even though the county was actually almost evenly split, because larger Obama precincts were combined with smaller Hillary precincts. The number of delegates in each precinct and county isn't determined by the number of voters in the precinct, but how many people in those precincts voted for a Democratic state official in the last general election - quite a convoluted formula.
Then we had 24 county resolutions to vote upon, as to whether we wanted them to advance to state level. It was now past 3 o'clock, the scheduled ending time for the convention. This voting took more than an hour.
Anyway, then our country has 6 "at large" delegates to elect. The overall "make up" of those delegates was suggested by the nominations committee, who by state rules, recommended that the at large delegate be selected to better balance out and reflect the overall attendance at the county level convention. So they determined that the at large delegates should be 1) Clinton supporters 2)Male and 3)Hispanic although overall, we could nominate and vote for anyone. Fortunately, the committee recommendations did win the overall vote, though for some reason some women and non-Hispanic were nominated.
It was now nearly 5 o'clock and many delegates had been leaving throughout the day. We finally left, as the only thing left to do was elect 6 at large alternates, and they were supposed to be for Obama.
There were parts that ran smoothly, the lunch line (Cici's pizza and soft drinks) ran efficiently. Initial check in went fine. It was after the convention actually started that things slowed down, and no one, seemed to know just what was going on.
Anyway, final delegate count for our county Obama 18, Hillary 10, which still isn't very reflective of the popular vote in the primary. 15 Obama to 13 Hillary would have been closer to the primary results.