Given the Iowa debacle, the NV Dems quickly dropped their app resulting in a new cumbersome manual check in process that resulting in really long lines for early voting in their caucuses. All in all, it took us 4 hours between leaving the house and returning home.
But the weather was lovely. Gorgeous actually, in the shade of the highschool courtyard we were queued up.
I spent most of the time chatting with Sandy. She was a retiree from West Virginia who moved to Vegas after her mother passed away. She works part time at Marshalls, who she said treats her well. She grew up in Baltimore, and her father passed away on on Valentines day in the 70’s. He served our nation as an engineer and logistics agent in World War 2, the Korean War, and Vietnam. We killed him with Agent Orange. Her uncle was native american and would attend high school games with his palomino in full regalia.
This was her first time early voting in the caucus. She said she was more conservative in the past, but this town had loosened her up.
Her cousin, Nancy, was the one who enticed Sandy to move out here to Vegas. She used to work in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. One of her friends was a high roller at the Rio and brought her out to this town a couple times. She liked it so much, she decided to retire out here in the early 2000’s. She was happily waiting in line after a horrible experience in the 2016 caucus which dragged out for hours in a contentious room.
She mentioned an acquaintance Chef Sheridan who was opening up a third restaurant. I had the pleasure of telling her the Every Grain is already open! She used to eat Sheridan’s Bao’s at the salon counter when he was working out of a truck, I think near at Tropicana and Decatur.
The guy in front of us was stocky a long haired dude who worked on the crew of a reality TV show. He grew up in New Jersey and got his MFA from CCA, which was still California College of the Arts and Crafts when I was at Berkeley. We compared notes on life in the Bay and lamented the high cost of living out there. We were both flummoxed on how anyone with a menial wage job can continue to survive out there.
He mentioned he was here to vote for Bernie. An hour later, my wife asked why ranked choice voting wasn’t more common. I’ve heard about the concept as long as I’ve been following politics as a kid, and my opinion is that it has never been implemented because the two parties want to keep their structural deathgrip on the political system. The danger of ranked choice voting is that it might make people feel more comfortable about voting on something crazy, such the Green party. We had a good laugh over mess we’re in.
And of course we shouldn’t ignore the hard work of the volunteers to keep the process running as smoothly as they could given the hand they were dealt. The caucus is managed by the political party so everything was being handled by volunteers. The district leader said he and his team got thirty minutes of training the day before. When they were overwhelmed that morning, he called in some favors from his friends in the Warren campaign who came and helped out. The guy who kept tabs wait times was just a voter who decided to hang around and help out when he saw how long the lines had become.
They passed out waters, and pulled out seats. They picked up some donuts, and shared some pizzas.
It was a long wait, but they kept the spirits up. It was as close to a civic party as you could get, queued up in a line with your fellow citizens.
It was a long wait, but you know what we didn’t waste our time talking about?
Yup.
He wasn’t worth mentioning.
We had better things on our mind.