Charley,

what I'm concerned about it the admission that:

"others had managed their caucuses 'in their own unique way' which will have to be reconciled with party rules."

It certainly seems as if MBW's caucus is one of these, since she admits that uncounted ballots were in her kitchen days later.

What happens if these caucuses can't be reconciled with party rules? Will those voters be disenfranchised? And what if they are reconciled even though the caucuses violated party rules at the time? Will some candidates suffer from those violations and others benefit?

If this happened in another country whose elections we were monitoring, we would not recognize the results. Can you imagine an African country telling Jimmy Carter "well, different parts of the country used entirely different rules, some of which were contradictory to the law, but we reconciled them after the fact."

Also your statement that

Could a Town Chair have altered the results at that point? Not easily. The Town Clerk/Voter Registrar was required to be at the caucus and check off each of the caucus attendees, so one could not add extra forms strikes me as optimistic.

You would not have to add extra forms, just substitute fake forms for real ones. In my experience, if you're creative enough you can do lots of stuff, provided you have the opportunity. This kind of irregularity provides the opportunity.

I'm not particularly bitter about any of this, by the way. While I don't much like Kerry, I'm prepared to vote for him when the time comes, and I don't dispute that he's winning the primaries and caucuses (though I do think it's possible his margins of victory are being tampered with).

I find it interesting that those directly involved in the caucuses accuse me of various emotions and motives for posting what are, to me, curious facets of our quirky process that suggest we need to come up with better systems. Please don't attribute to me bitterness or resentment or "the same flavor as the behavior of some of the more aggressive Deaniacs." I'm not being aggressive, bitter or resentful. I'm saying "This is how we pick a president? There's probably a better way."

I think maybe I'm hitting some nerves with folks who sacrificed hours of their lives to the electoral process this year. So Don and Charley, I'm not casting aspersions on you guys because you're running your local caucuses; on the contrary, volunteer labor like yours is necessary to the process as it exists today. But that process itself is a pretty chaotic one, it seems to me, with lots of opportunities for fraud.

I am, of course, also aware that this is a party caucus and not a general election. But the two parties have become so entrenched that winning in the primary/caucus system is a de facto prerequisite for the presidency.   In fact, it is this secondary fact that has made the primary/caucus system so problematic; if anyone who ran for the presidency without a major party nod actually had a chance, then the primaries and caucuses wouldn't really be issues. There would be more parties, and the boundaries between them would be more fluid. Even if internal party people wanted to spike the results and nominate a different candidate unfairly (which again is NOT what I am suggesting is happening today), it wouldn't be anyone's business but the rest of the party. And a candidate so wronged could move on to another party and run anyway.

Personally, I think the founding fathers who warned about the emergence of political parties harming our democracy were right. But then, they were right about so much...