“Why Is Anyone Still Doing Caucuses?”

Evan McMorris-Santoro for BuzzFeed:

About a half hour from the Las Vegas Strip, in a large public high school on the day the state’s Democratic nominating contest, a man stepped up onto the gym bleachers and shouted:

“Let’s make sure we never caucus again!”

“And then,” said Sondra Cosgrove, president of the League of Women Voters of Las Vegas Valley, “the whole room erupted, chanting, ‘No more caucus! no more caucus!’”

The man, and Cosgrove, were among the 80,000 or so who sucked it up and made their voice heard during a chaotic Saturday in Nevada last month. Their particular caucus site — El Dorado High School — had all the hallmarks of the process: confusing rules, long lines that seemed to go nowhere, volunteers unprepared to deal with the crush of people who showed up.

Cosgrove came to caucus for Clinton, and while she wasn’t sure who the man on the bleachers supported, they were all united in one shared cause that afternoon. “Everybody was angry,” she said.

Few things in modern electoral politics go as predictably, publicly badly as a high-profile caucuses in America. For people like Cosgrove — interested in fair, well-attended, and fraud-free elections — the caucus system just doesn’t cut it.

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