Reply #8: crispini, I'm pretty sure you're right

[sonias]

Filling out the delegation is something different than the vote to determine the strength of the voting block by preference.

So to sort of combine your answer and voiceofreason's answer/question.

#1) The first vote of the caucus is essentially signing in with a presidential preference at the precinct caucus. You must be present to vote. No, you can not mail in a proxy and you can not write in anyone's name who is not present. But people who have to leave relatively quickly are voting when they sign in with a preference.

Based on that voting strength the rest of the precinct caucus gets decided on that voting strength. That's why it is important to get your neighbors in your precincts to come out and vote. If even for the 15 minutes it takes to sign in. When you vote for a PCT chair and secretary, those present have the full strength of the voting block. So even if some people leave, you in essence have their proxy.

An example I gave earlier is this one:
Your PCT gets 12 delegates that can go to your county convention. This is pre-determined by the county party and based on your voting turnout in 2004 and 2006. All of those numbers are provided to the chair/person who picked up the PCT convention packet.

Let's say 36 people show up to your PCT convention that night. Let's say 24 of them sign in for Obama and 12 for Clinton. The Obama voting strength is 2/3 and Clinton's 1/3. The Obama campaign will get 2/3 of the 12 delegates or 8, and Clinton will get 1/3 or 4. These are the people that get selected to go to the county/senate conventions.

It doesn't matter if all of the initial signers are present to vote for those delegates. Let's say that only 15 people from the Obama camp are present to vote for the actual names of the people who want to move on as delegates. Well those 15 people choose their 8 delegates for Obama.

In other words both camps sort of conduct mini conventions within the PCT convention to elect the people, loyal to their candidate, to move on.

The big vote is in allocating those delegates based on the presidential voting preference. So showing up and signing in, is very important.

#2) Filling out the delegation can be done anytime before the convention secretary has to turn in the official paperwork for the convention. I think it's about 3 days here in Travis. We caucus on Tuesday night and by Friday our paperwork has to be delivered to the Travis County Party Chair. I did this exact same thing for the last convention, the off presidential year one. We had more county delegates assigned to us that we had people who wanted to move on. Remember gubernatorial elections years are not as sexy as presidential election years, so not as many people want to go to the state convention on those years.

So we filled out our delegation later by calling people who had voted in the primary to see if they wanted to go to the county/senate district convention.

Trust me 99.9% of us are not going to have that problem this year. This year everyone will want to go to the county & state conventions and it will be stiff competition in the pct caucuses to get elected.

That's my understanding of what filling out the delegation means. Yes you can do it after the convention, but in theory you are only doing that to fill available slots that were not filled in the PCT caucus. It' much more relevant in off presidential years.

Sonia