As final results from the Texas Democratic caucus remain unknown, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign wants signatures from the March 4 contest verified before party conventions are held around the state later this month.
In a letter sent to the state Democratic Party late Friday, the Clinton campaign requests the March 29 count and state Senate district conventions be postponed until the eligibility of an estimated 1 million caucus-goers are double checked.
The Clinton campaign wrote they received more than 2,000 complaints of violations following the historic Texas turnout, which was perhaps the nation's largest caucus ever.
In one way, I don't blame her. Kind of sad in a way that finally Texas actually MATTERED in a primary, and precinct conventions were held, where not only had they not been before in a lot of instances, but a lot of people didn't even know WHAT they were.
The thing is, it's the job of the county chair at the county convention to certify that all the precinct stuff is correct so IF there are errors, they can be caught at that time if they weren't before. How to do that? Because every person who has signed in at the precinct convention can be verifiied (or not) against the Texas VAN to make sure, 1, that the person is a registered voter and 2. that, against the voting rolls, that person actually voted and that 3. that person attended the correct precinct convention. In other words, there is error checking built in and it's my understanding that the TDP is going to (or has already) sent out explicit instructions to the county chairs on what to do to double-check all those voters.
The answer to all this type of thing in the future, in my opinion, is to make it so that the states primaries CONTINUE TO MATTER. Oh, I know there are some that don't want the process to keep going on past a certain point, but it would be nice to at least pretendt to pay lip service to voters who, up until this year, couldn't get too excited about voting for president in the primary because it didn't dang matter!
P.S. Adding this clip I did about a week ago of Evan Bayh arguing that the primaries/caucuses should go forward, including in his state. Now, given WHEN his state actually votes, he's previously been in the same boat as Texas, eh? But here he argues that it's democracy going forward to let all the people vote. Which is it,?
