I am taking a brief break from health and nutrition issues for a comment on the broken Republican caucus process, and how embarrassing it is to have a new immigrant see how the Republican caucus process was run in Minnesota tonight.
The following is the reason we need to clean out the politicians who have broken our government, and pick a man who can fix our budget and government employee bloat problem – and Make America Great Again.
My wife has been in the USA for 8 years, and participated in one presidential election. This was the first opportunity for her to see the caucus process in Minnesota, and we went to take part in the “democratic process.”
Her comments were that she believes there is little true democracy from what she has seen.
We arrived at the Republican caucus site to find that there was next to no signage to tell people where to go. Upon entering the caucus site, we asked a representative where to find our precinct site, and she told us “just go in there” and pointed at a line.
We are in precinct 37, but found we were directed to precinct 2A instead, because “there were too long of lines” to go into our own precinct. We were asked to sign a sheet with our name and address to “qualify us,” and shoved into the precinct room.
We would have been allowed to vote for the precinct chair and secretary, had we chosen to. We did vote for the presidential candidate of our choice, but it still was disturbing – especially with what we saw happening.
There was a nice elderly gentleman running things when we arrived. He was nominated for chair, and people voted for his election. But, another man who was a bit of an a-hole questioned his election, and nominated himself and forced another vote. There was almost a fist fight over the situation. He basically railroaded himself into the chairmanship of the precinct.
They opened the floor for “1 person per candidate” to speak. The “chairman” took a good 5 minutes to rail on about how great a candidate Ted Cruz is, and how awful Donald Trump is. They then allowed a man to speak for about 30 seconds on Donald Trump, and kept interrupting him. Next came Marco Rubio’s representative, who also railed on about how awful Donald Trump is.
What happened to the days of positive campaigning?
Next came voting for the presidential candidate. They took votes, and called an end to voting, even though they did not have enough ballots, and not enough paper for manual entry, for all the people. They also did not make sure they collected all ballots before counting the votes.
I then watched as they dumped the ballots out over the top of a trash bin, and 4 people quickly counted their “pile” of ballots. There were ballots on the floor, in chairs, and it was obvious they were not careful in their counting. They then each reported on all 8 candidates (including the 1 write-in spot) to the secretary, who then announced the “winner” for the precinct – which was the “favored” Ted Cruz.
They then “elected” the delegates to the county convention. There should have been 14, with 14 alternates, but they basically chose 14 people with some “convincing” of the ones beyond the 5 who volunteered.
Naturally, I question the overall results reported by the Minnesota Republican caucus.
It sure did not seem well run, and should be investigated by the GOP.
