(This is my first diary ever - I hope I'm doing things right...)
Saturday was an incredible experience I will not soon forget. I was a delegate for precinct 148 at the Travis County convention for Obama.
First of all, a bit background info: I'm a college student majoring in computer engineering, never in my life involved in politics before about 9 months ago when I became extremely interested in the Democratic nomination race. My precinct is made up of all the University of Texas students that live in the on-campus dorms. On March 4th, I waited in line for almost 2 hours to vote in the Texas primary and stood with the thousands of students who turned out to caucus, which ended up being complete chaos. Then I attended the precinct convention where we just wrote our names on a list if we wanted to be a delegate because the turnout was so large and it was already so late that there was no way we could have held formal nominations.
Now on to the county convention...
At the county convention, our precinct had 24 Obama delegates (including elevated alternates) and 6 Clinton delegates. Our precinct caucus went 70% Obama, 30% Clinton so I thought this was a great turnout for our precinct, especially considering that we started organizing the Obama delegates on Wednesday, 3 days before the convention! Our delegation chair had only received a list of delegates and alternates on Wednesday and a list with everyone's contact information on Thursday. Even then, the two lists were very different and we were left frantic to figure out who was actually an Obama delegate and who was an alternate.
We set up a Friday night meeting through Facebook to get all Obama delegates and alternates organized and thankfully had 20 people show up. We managed to figure out who would be nominated for state delegate and alternate spots, how to get everyone there (most didn't have cars), contact everyone who didn't make it and obtain letters from delegates who couldn't make it make the process of elevating alternates to delegate spots relatively pain free in about an hour.
The drive to the convention would normally take 20 minutes, but it took us (me and a fellow Obama delegate) 80 minutes to get there. We left a little after 8:30 am and sign in closed at 10 am so we cut it real close. We ended up running from the farthest back parking lot to get to sign-in but thankfully, someone stopped us and said we didn't need to run because sign-in had been extended. The sign-in area was really unorganized but our precinct delegation chair helped us get into the right line to sign in so we had signed in within 15 minutes of getting there. My precinct got to sit on the center floor level, which was great because you could see all the action from where we were sitting. The bad thing was we were sitting right under a speaker so our ears really took a hit yesterday.
The convention was officially called to order at 11:30 am, just an hour and a half later than it was suppose to, but the credentialing took forever and I don't remember when my senate district actually started caucusing to figure out state delegates and alternates. It must have been around 2-3 pm. In the meantime, I decided to be deputized as a volunteer voter registrar and most of my precinct either attempted to sleep (went out for too long last night) or attempted to do homework and study. Neither was really possible because it was so loud and again, the speaker being right above us didn't help but we definitely tried.
You could tell that we were the UT precinct because of all the textbooks in our area and because we cheered the loudest when Ron Kirk spoke and said the older generation needed to "move over" to allow the younger generation to step up and become leaders of America. A lot of people had been coming up to us to express their concern that we should at least have some older, more experienced people in our precinct to lead us - our precinct chair is 21 and our delegation chair is 19 - so we were very happy that he addressed the age issue. After Ron Kirk spoke, more people came to talk to us and they all told us how happy they were to see young people so involved in this nomination process.
During the precinct caucus (where individual precincts met to nominate and elect state delegates and alternates), we ended up getting stuck in a 5-way tie for 4 delegate positions and had no idea how that would be resolved. Our delegation chair was about to start panicking until I remembered that I had brought with me the information packet I got when I went to a delegate training at the local Obama office. In it there was a section about what to do in case of a tie like the one we had. Basically we had to choose delegates using a game of chance. Someone had a deck of cards so we used that and ended up with a 3 Obama - 1 Clinton split with the other Obama person being assured an alternate spot. Even though I'm glad we followed the rules, I kind of wished we didn't because I was in fact the other Obama person who could've been a state delegate and ended up being an alternate. So after we finished the caucus result forms and turned them in, I went and filled out the form to be an at-large state delegate. After all this it was already 5 PM and they were about to start the voting on the resolutions but I was so exhausted that I decided to go home then.
Now for the pictures! Here are the only good pictures that came out of the convention. The weird arena lighting made it very hard for pictures to come out looking ok as well as the fact that I'm not very good with cameras...
Random picture of all the people and signs.
Just a funny picture of everyone trying to sleep. I don't think any of us had more than 5 hours of sleep the night before...
Here's all of the Obama delegates from my precinct meeting together.
Me holding the sign one of our alternates drew so we would know where to meet outside of the convention.
The other side of the sign - it took me the longest time to figure out what FTW meant.