48 Hours later..Still No Winner In The Texas Caucus
Nor will there ever be at the rate the caucus was run!
Fewer than half of Texas’ voting sites had reported the results by Thursday from Democratic caucuses Tuesday night that were so chaotic and overcrowded by record turnout that police were called to some polling places.
As of Thursday afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama was ahead with 56 percent to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 44 percent based on reports to state party headquarters by 41 percent of the precinct caucuses. Clinton beat Obama in the first step of Texas’ contest, a standard state-run primary. Her 51 percent of the vote, compared to his 47 percent, earned her 65 delegates to his 61 delegates.
One reason for the slow caucus count is that phoning in the results to state party officials is voluntary.
The 8,247 precinct officials are required only to mail the results of their caucuses to their county party chairmen 72 hours after the primary election day. County chairmen don’t have to reveal those results until county or state Senate district conventions March 29.“We’ve gotten a lot of results back, but it’s important to remember Texas is a large state, and this is a voluntary call-in system,” said party spokesman Hector Nieto.
But reporting results was only part of the problem with Texas’ twenty-year-old, two-stage system in which a standard state-run primary is followed on the Democratic side by party-run caucuses held at the same voting sites but until 15 minutes after all primary voting ends.
The primary-caucus system, nicknamed the “Texas Two-step,” has never been tested like it was this week, said Gerry Birnberg, Democratic chairman in Harris County, where Houston is located.
March 6, 2008 - 07:16 PM on March 6th, 2008
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March 6, 2008 - 07:30 PM on March 6th, 2008
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