Nevada caucus lawsuit roundup. (updated)
As Eduardo mentioned here recently, the Nevada State Education Association (NSEA) along with six Nevada residents have filed a federal lawsuit to block caucus sites on the Vegas strip on the grounds that the process unfairly favors casino workers. Last year, the Nevada Democratic Party set up caucus sites in five casinos in order to increase participation by those whose work schedules make it nearly impossible to caucus near their homes. Vegas casino workers are members of the Culinary Workers Union, which endorsed Obama last week. A couple days later, the NSEA filed the lawsuit. While officially the NSEA remains neutral, several of its leaders have publicly endorsed Clinton.
This Washington Post article provides pretty good background on the story. Note that “state Democratic officials, who had been expecting the suit, said they had worked with each presidential campaign since last spring to craft the process, including the casino precincts, to drum up the largest turnout possible.” And, get this: “Minutes from the meeting last March when the state Democratic committee approved the caucus process show that several of the parties to the suit were there and approved of the process.”
Still, Bill Clinton vigorously defends the lawsuit.
“Do you really believe that all the Democrats understood that they had agreed to give everybody who voted in a casino a vote worth five times as much as people who voted in their own precinct? Did you know that?” Mr. Clinton said in a testy exchange with a television reporter, Mark Matthews of KGO. “What happened is nobody understood what had happened. … Now, everybody’s saying, ‘Oh they don’t want us to vote.’ What they really tried to do was to set up a deal where their votes counted five times, maybe even more.”
Clinton’s claim that “nobody understood what had happened” seems dubious. These nobodies had many months to wake up to the reality of what they had approved, and yet somehow it didn’t occur to them to look into it until the Culinary Workers endorsed Obama. Right.
Here’s John Kerry’s take on the controversy. He thinks the lawsuit is bunk. I tend to agree.
Update: The lawsuit was dismissed.
Here is a link to a story in the Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jan/13/culinary-leader-closing-sites-strip-would-strike-c/
And here is a link to a news analysis piece in the same paper that goes into the math of it all
http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/early-line/2008/jan/13/actual-impact–large-precincts/
Here is a comment disagreeing with the two articles above that gives the other side of the story.
Thanks for that info, David–that is very helpful. I’ll edit my post accordingly.
Question: teachers have to work on Saturdays? Also, the comment writer you cite says that only workers at the major casinos are allowed to vote in the at-large sites. The article on which the writer comments makes clear that any shift worker within 2.5 miles of the sites can caucus there–including cabbies and gas station attendants. I also can’t find anything that supports the claim that the delegate-assignment formula was changed at the last minute. In fact, Tavis Brock, exec. director of the NV State Democratic Party, said that some of the plaintiffs voted in favor of the draft delegate selection rules.
I don’t know the answer to the questions, but I have found a link to a PDF of the complaint that was filed by the Nevada State Education Association. Perhaps some of our lawyers can take a look at it.
http://vegaspundit.typepad.com/vegas_pundit/files/filed_complaint.pdf
Here’s a helpful SF local news report posted on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uthdea6X2PE
Thanks, Martin. I couldn’t figure out an elegant way to update my post as I came across new information (including that TV news report), so I deleted the first update, which repeated the information in David Nickol’s citation. Having read the lawsuit, it’s clear to me that the comment writer he quoted and Bill Clinton are simply wrong about the way in which the delegates would be parceled out. Because the NV Democratic Party wanted to create at-large sites that were not tied to the shift workers’ home precincts, delegates could not be alloted according to the formula for regular precincts. Those precincts receive one delegate for every fifty registered voters in the precinct, regardless of voter turnout at the caucus site. The at-large sites receive delegates based on turnout. Short of undoing the at-large system, how else could this have been done?