King County Presidential Convention

1. There were 4,274 delegates nominated to be at the convention. Only about a 1,000 showed up.

2. Most of them (I'd guestimate 75%) were empty-nester age. A few younger couples, one of which I saw brought their children for the experience and the rest young college students.

3. I like the band who played before the convention because their music was geared towards us older folks.

4. After I signed in outside the gymnasium of Green River College, I went through the door and they pointed me to a room for credentialing!! What was that? (Iworried that I needed to have credentials of some sort) It is a fancy word for taking roll. We sign in again and get our official delegate tag. We don't want any one from the other parties crashing our convention and messing things up! So here is my tag after it sat in my pocket for a couple of days.

5. The Pledge of Allegiance was said and I might say it was done loud and proud. No need to vote on whether to say it or not.

6. We got to hear from all the candidates who want to win Senate, governor's, Lt. Governor's, House seats, and etc. in the next election. I actually enjoyed what they said and there was a lot of whistling, applause and standing up in support of each candidate.

7. It must have taken over an hour to tally up the delegates and alternate delegates so we could not do any official business until that was done and presented and accepted.

8. First of order of business -- will we accept the late arrivals even though the rules says no. I was surprise that we would consider it -- since it is a rule and there is a time later on that you can officially change the rules. But they were accepted.

9. The platform was presented. New officers were nominated and chosen.

10. Changes to the rules and regulations were beginning to be presented and challenged. That was an intersting procedure. Only two microphones were going so if I wanted to say anything I would have needed to run down the bleachers to a microphone quickly. Remember we are all older folks. I was sitting next to an older gentlemen who needed help getting up and down for the standing votes. Also, often they did not speak into the microphone closely and we could not hear. So those districts sitting on the floor next to the microphones had the advantage.

11. We started to do a delegate vote. First, you do a verbal yea and nay. If it is not clear who won, then you do a stand up count and if that is not clear the chairman of each legislative district must make a count in his district.

12. Since this is a long procedure they started to dismiss by districts those who wanted to get lunch. What? How do you hear the presentations and challenges of rules and policy changes? And how do you vote if you're out of the room getting lunch? Oh well!

13 Somewhere around 1:00pm someone challenged whether we had a quorum to legitimize any votes or changes? What? (A quorum is 20% of the nominated delegates (4,274). So 854 delegates are needed.) So a rather lengthy count was done and there was not enough -- only 700+ was left. Many people leaving for lunch never came back.

14. So we dismissed not being able to change any of the

rules and policies. I've decided I have a lot to learn about these caucuses and conventions. I got some terminology to learn. Mostly, I'd like to nominate James to be on the organizing committee of these conventions. It was a little unorganized and often I couldn't hear what was being said because of all the buzzing and talking going on. Some of the officers were unclear of the rules and were talking among themselves to get it right. It's hard to vote when you didn't quite get it. So here I was saying, "What are we voting on? And what did they say?

I guess I'll have to wait 4 more years to try again.