Linda Campbell 
Round 2 of Texas delegate selction 'was a huge mess'
A post-mortem of last month's chaotic Democratic conclaves may lead to a more streamlined future. Let's hope so.
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Frank Colosi got it exactly right when I asked him what led to the excruciatingly long registration process at the Democrats' District 10 convention March 29.
"You have to start with the realization that this is a process that only works when it doesn't matter," he said.
When little's at stake, thousands of voters aren't newly impassioned and only party insiders gather when the polls close, the flaws in the convoluted procedures for Democratic caucusing and delegate choosing are easily overlooked.
But this year ... well, it was a spectacle worse than the making of legislation.
"It's just not designed to handle anything of this magnitude," said Colosi, a civil rights lawyer and state convention at-large delegate for Hillary Clinton.
That has become painfully obvious to the throngs of eager, excited supporters of Clinton and Barack Obama who've now devoted more hours of their lives than they probably imagined it would take to make sure their candidate carries as many Texas delegates as possible all the way to the party nomination.Chaotic caucuses, convoluted conventions -- how do you hold people's enthusiasm after making them fume all day just to check in and make their voices heard?
Surely there's a better way to choose Texas' 193 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, said exhausted and frustrated precinct delegates to the March 29 senatorial district conventions. Delays happened across Tarrant County and the state. Could it have been avoided? Let's take a look at what happened in District 10.
Some delegates' perception
Delegates who arrived at the District 10 convention at Will Rogers Coliseum in Fort Worth by 8 a.m. wondered why sign-in didn't start for some three hours and credentials packets weren't handed out until late afternoon. (The convention lasted into the wee hours because after precincts chose their state delegates, resolutions had to be considered and at-large delegates allocated.)
Bloggers for "DonkeyTales08" on the Star-Telegram Web site heard that a plan for check-in using bar-code scanning was scrapped at the last minute.
Precinct 4230 captain Bronson Davis, a former Texas Christian University vice chancellor, attributed the interminable waiting to confusion, poor communication and generally "the ineptitude of conference organizers."
Davis blogged that Linda Cozzen, temporary convention chairwoman, had come up with a bar-code system for enrolling delegates alphabetically and lined up volunteers, only to have the plan nixed by Tarrant County Party Chairman Art Brender because of flaws in the system.
The local party leader's response
Not so, Brender said.
"This was a huge mess," he said in a telephone interview.
Delegate lists had to be prepared from minutes of the precinct caucuses, but the minutes "were a mess," he said. Among other things, many precinct caucuses had elected too many delegates, and all couldn't vote at the district convention.
Tarrant County had sent its caucus information to the state party office, which had prepared a delegate list that turned out to be missing precincts and to have reversed some delegates' presidential preferences. "The names were hopelessly scrambled," he said.
Cozzen's bar-code system was based on incorrect data, Brender said, and the credentials committee decided that it couldn't be used.
"You can't possibly organize this on no money," Brender said.
The view from inside
The magnitude of the verification problems didn't become clear until about 9 p.m. the Friday before the Saturday conventions, said Colosi, a member of the District 10 credentials committee.
The state party had scanned data to produce a computerized list, but it was incomplete and had errors, including listing some Obama supporters for Clinton and vice versa. The best way to be accurate with sign-ins would be to go back to the original caucus documents to verify that everyone who showed up actually was a properly elected delegate.
"We had hoped we would have a list to cut down on time, but we didn't," he said.
"We were willing to use anything that would be more efficient if it turned out to be valid."
About midnight that Friday, the committee members decided that once everyone was signed in Saturday, each precinct would be told its correct number of delegates and allocated that many badges for voting purposes.
"My perspective on that Saturday was that it really didn't take that long," said lawyer Robert Aldrich, an Obama supporter on the District 10 credentials committee.
Of course, that's based on "where we were at 10 o'clock" Friday.
"The list from Austin was, to be charitable, unacceptable," Aldrich said.
"Had that list been right, or had we not had an expectation we could rely on that list, earlier on we could have been putting together lists that could have been streamlined the sign-in process."
"I'm not faulting Austin," he said. "Everybody's doing this on a shoestring."
Working into the wee hours, both men said, committee members stopped being Obama and Clinton supporters and just looked for fair and workable solutions.
"It generally worked in accomplishing that one goal: to get the math right" -- that is, making sure each precinct was fairly represented and each candidate was fairly represented within the precinct, Colosi said.
The state party's response
State Democratic officials chalk it up to growing pains -- an ironic characterization for a party that dominated the state for most of its history.
"When you have such a tremendous turnout at the precinct convention level, you're going to run into problems," party spokesman Hector Nieto said in a telephone interview.
"The Texas Democratic Party did as much as it could with the amount of time it had and the resources it had" in order to help the local chapter, he said.
Nieto said the system is designed to take time so that people can raise questions if they consider the process unfair.
So far, 26 challenges to the last round of voting and delegate allocation have been filed and will be resolved at the state convention in June. Resolutions proposing changes in the multitier caucus/convention/at-large allocation, which was implemented in 1988, also will come up then.
"Can the system be upgraded? Yes, it can," Nieto said. "It would take significant amounts of resources."
The solution?
Some Democrats favor just using primary voting to determine how many delegates each candidate gets. (That's how the Republicans do it.)
But even those exasperated by the confusion have recognized the community-building resulting from the caucuses and conventions and the way that the drawn-out process keeps the candidates plugged into the state.
At the very least, the state should reconsider the primary/convention timeline.
State law requires that county and senatorial district conventions come three weeks after party primaries. When the primary was later in the spring, that made sense because state conventions are in June. But when primaries were moved to March, the timing of the mid-tier conventions wasn't changed.
This year, these idle two months until the state convention could have been used to better prepare for the district conventions.
But even if efforts to streamline the process result in changes, will it matter? Will Texas Democrats be overcome with another knock-down wave of participation like this year? Will they be organized enough to capitalize on their rejuvenation?
"I don't think people in general will take the experience they had ... back with them and say, 'That was the most screwed-up thing; I don't see how the Democratic Party can operate,'" Aldrich said.
Texas Democrats had better hope he's right.
Linda P. Campbell is a Star-Telegram editorial writer. 817-390-7867
