Nevada GOP's sundown caucus becomes raucous

Quote: SanchoPanza

Congregations hire non-Jews (Shabbos goy) to perform all the actual physical labor entailed.

Hypocritical ones do, anyway.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

This is fodder for an entirly different thread, but...
AZ's Bar Mitzvah story is typical of the varying amounts of observance as well as thehipocrach within the religion.

That is becoming a huge policy issue on the national level with Washington's ordering one religion that has very firm positions on birth control to issue contraceptives, despite the fact that many surveys show a preponderance of the members of the religion use them.

Quote: Nareed

Hypocritical ones do, anyway.

Hypocritical how? Sounds more like tolerant ones that do it to me.

Quote: Wizard

A caucus is like a primary, but you're required to show up at a particular time. It is dressed up to look like a meeting, where participants can make a statement, but who cares about that? I'm sure sure everyone goes in knowing who they are going to vote for. Personally, I strongly prefer a normal primary, where you can show up at a convenient time, and be in and out in minutes. The Nevada caucus takes about 90 minutes.

The whole primary process seems out of whack to me. Granted they are not an election, but Florida decided to hold their primary on 31 January (which was forbidden by the Republican party). In punishment, the RNC will only count half their delegates.

So the Republican citizens of Florida are now voting two men = one vote in the primary. As a practical matter, it probably won't decide the nomination. But theoretically it shouldn't happen. There should be a lottery that determines when the states get to hold their primaries or caucuses. It should always be on a Tuesday, so there is no religious bias. It should be the luck of the draw if a big state like Florida gets the first primary. Possibly New Hampshire might end up in the final week.

Nevada almost moved their caucus to January (before Florida). But the Republican party promised preferential seating and hotel room at the Republican convention, so they agreed to move it to after 1 February.

Only 1.65 million people voted in the FL Republican primaries. Out of a state of 19 million people. That's a small fraction of the 4 million Floridians that voted for McCain in 2008. And their votes are only going to count for half as much as normal.

Forget the issue of Jews leaving their home to vote on Saturday. More people should be voting in primaries. They should experiment with voting by computer in primaries to work out the bugs and see if it can be adopted to the general election.

The whole process seems susceptible to corruption and favoritism.

Quote: pacomartin

So the Republican citizens of Florida are now voting two men = one vote in the primary.

Not really. There's no such thing as 1 man = 1 vote in primaries for either party. Delegates are assigned to each state based on a formula involving the number of elected Republicans in the state (Senators, Congressman, etc) plus bonus for winning a state in the Previous Presidential election (Missouri gets a nice bounce even though they barely went McCain in '08). Those are bonus delegates, NOT the same as super delegates that the Democrats had, wherein all of your Senators and Congressman were also delegates.
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P12/R-Alloc.phtml

1. Most of this country prohibits the sale of alcohol Sunday mornings just to get people to go to church.
2. First Amendment: Congress may not pass a law to endorse a religion and no law shall interfer with a person's practise of a religion.
3. No person should be forced to vote instead of going to religious services, whether it is on a Saturday or Sunday.
4. With the exception of Puerto Rico, which is not a state and has no voting rights, no state in the U.S. votes on a Sunday.
5. What outrage would there be if the voting was Sunday morning and the choice was between voting and religious services?
6. This is a fundamental problem with caucuses where you are forced in a short time frame to be there or not vote.
7. There is no reason not to have a 12+ hour voting window to accomodate LIFE.
8. Voting on Saturday discrimates and segregates all people who observe Saturday as the Sabbath.
9. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling has to do with the religious aspect of Ten Commandment monuments. The Ten Commandments as "historical and educational"
monuments with no religious connotations are legal.

Quote: AZDuffman

IOpen Primaries mainly invite mischief.

You'd love Minnesota's open caucuses. There's no party registration in MN, and the only rule is that each person can only caucus with one party. I'd expect a lot of left-leaning voters to attend the GOP's caucuses on Tuesday. Any kind of organized anyone-but-Romney strategy on their part would definitely benefit the Big O. But I'm probably just being fooling thinking that the left could be orgainzed;-)

The first amendment is applied to the states through the 14th amendment, but the Nevada GOP and not the State of Nevada is making this particular rule.

Caucuses with a short timeframe are a very bad idea. Looking at who voted in NV's Caucus, it seems that either there are very very few Republicans in NV under the age of 45 or younger workers weren't comfortable asking off of work to participate. There were apparently about 6x more voters in the 45-65 demo than in the 18-45 demo.

I like Maine's system: Voting runs from 2/7-2/11. Votes from the caucuses are tallied over the weekend.

Quote: rdw4potus

Caucuses with a short timeframe are a very bad idea.

Especially in Nevada. This is a 24-hour town with people working around the clock. The Saturday morning before the Super Bowl is a busy time and I'm sure a lot of votes were missed of those who had to work.

Quote: MrV

Nothing wrong was done here, the actions were NOT unconstitutional.

The first amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, or impeding the free exercise of religion.

The questioned action did NOT cross the line; in essence it asked those who wanted to vote "after hours" to state affirmatively that they had a good reason not to vote earlier.

From the Wiz' description above, that is not what the affidavit asked.