The Nevada Caucus

So, I would not call myself a really political person, even though I always vote. I admit that there have been times I've stepped into a voting booth and not had all of the information about every candidate.

This year, Nevada had a Presidential Caucus instead of a Primary election... I am still a bit fuzzy on the details, but how it works is that each voting district is given a number of delegates based on the registered number of voters in the area. So, for our district we had 14 Republican delegates who needed to be chosen in our Caucus, and their votes only would go towards the next vote which is on Feb 23.

It felt like a flashback to the old days - instead of walking into a little private booth to vote, we had to declare our support for a candidate before we could be selected as delegate. There were several members of our ward there, so we kind of rallied together to vote for our delegates.

I decided to support Mitt Romney - I wouldn't call myself a "Mitten", the term Rush Limbaugh coined for female Mitt supporters (although I do think he is handsome and looks very presidential). So, there we were with 13 people who wanted to be delegates - if we had exactly 14 we didn't need to do a vote, which meant no one minute speech followed by a possibly embarrassing "playground" style vote. I did not want to be the last kid picked for the kickball team, but with some persuasion from my friends in the ward I stepped forward to be #14. And low and behold, four more people stepped up right when I did. Crap! Now I had to do the speech!!!

Long story short, I got out something about same-sex marriage and supporting families, and I am now an official Republican Party Delegate. Of course, once we were "elected" we were told there is a $35 fee to be a delegate. Nice... But maybe that is just for the dinner they are having...

Anyway, I do feel kind of excited to be more involved and a part of the process, but it did feel a little old school, like not 1980s but 1880s when we held a straw vote at the end to report back to the polls (it didn't really count) and we ran out of official ballot sheets. So, I scrawled out Mitt Romney on a torn piece of binder paper and that was my vote! Very official!

Oh, and Mitt Romney won the Caucus and received 51 percent of the Republican Party vote - and Hillary Clinton won in a close race on the Democrat side.