On Super Tuesday, I woke up and read an email that my dad had sent me telling me and my siblings to vote. My dad has always wanted us to do our civic duty and be up to date in politics and news and VOTE.
Well this year in Idaho, we voted at a caucas, not a small polling station. This caucas was in downtown Boise at the Boise State Taco Bell Arena. It started at 7. Since I knew the kids would not be good while waiting, only one of us could vote and Trent happily volunteered to stay with the kids.
I arrived at 5:30 (so I didn't have to wait in lines in the freezing weather) and happily waited in the warm arena until 7. Then we got the announcment that there were still a few thousand people outside waiting in line so we had to wait until they got in. We ended up having almost 10,000 people in attendance, the biggest caucas in the US.
About 45 minutes later everyone was in. After a few short speeches from each candidate's representative, we started the voting process. We were each given a newly minted penny, and dropped it in the bucket of the one person we wanted.
Then the counting started, counting each penny in what seemed like hundreds of small buckets. Then we waited another hour and a half (Squished between people on both sides, in the middle of a row) And, If one person did not win by 51%, the process would start over eliminating the lowest candidate, and so on and so on until there was one winner.
By 10:00 I was starving, thirsty, hot and tired. Finally the results were in and LUCKILY Romney won with just over 51%.
I sat for 5 hours by myself and by the last couple hours I was bored out of my mind. This will be the LAST time that I will caucas by myself,and maybe, just maybe will I go back if I can go with someone else.
It was really interesting how the process worked, but my goodness, it was a LONG process. Another 45 minutes to get home and end the evening at 11:30. What a long night!
