What I wish I had known before we held our caucus in Hawaii.

[mahina]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4733698

You may or may not have read the headlines from Hawaii about how totally overwhelmed our formerly tiny caucuses were. In my neighborhood alone we had 200 or so vote in 04, and this year we had 3000 people show up. End of the day, our vote was 286 Clinton to 1172 Obama. Our party leadership is strongly for Clinton. They did not heed the plea to prepare district chairs for a very massive turnout.

We ended up not even registering people, just taking little slips of paper (ballots and backup ballots ran out immediately) and signing them in to each precinct. At the end of the day, we had no overvotes. Each precinct conducted a fair and open election, but about 2/3 of the crowd didn't stay for the (two) long lines they had to stand in originally. More people showed up for our little valley caucus than attended the entire state convention last year, and our turnout while high was consistent with others.

Were I asked what we could do differently, I'd have trained greeters with precinct maps tell everyone their precinct number, and go directly to precinct elections.

Have a team of people offering brownies, water, etc, and a place for the little ones to play, watched by their parents of course. Getting people to stay and be happy and calm was a big accomplishment, to the degree that we were successful in accomplishing that. Getting the word out early to expect it to take a while, and consider it like a big party, where you'll meet your neighbors and come home having made new friends. We had people playing ukulele, Hawaiian music, bringing food, and it helped keep the voters from getting too grumpy. Not all districts were so lucky.

God bless our district chair, she worked so hard. And likewise all volunteers.

Some pics, courtesy of Scott Fost er, and a couple of newspaper links and also a great video from our newspaper website http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article... .

From the Advertiser:
"The latest numbers released by the Hawaii Democratic Party today show U.S. Sen. Barack Obama garnered 28,347 caucus votes, or 75.74 percent of the vote, while U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton received 8,835 votes, or 23.61 percent"
Keep em happy!
Aloha

[sonias]

1. Those are beautiful photos

You had 3,000 people show up when you had 400 show up in '04! That's amazing.

:applause:

Sonia