Talk:2008 Washington Democratic presidential caucuses

Neutrality

This is pretty bogus but an anon keeps wanting to put that all in. The criticisms are the same for all caucus states, not Washington, and I think is giving it undue weight. I've already reverted twice similar content and do not wish to [violate WP:3RR, anyone want to take a crack at removing this or at least cutting away the extraneous parts? Calwatch (talk) 22:01, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

The Washington Democratic caucuses were open to voters who could: afford to spend hours openly debating politics, publicly state their political views, be willing to listen to others expound on their own personal political views, locate the actual caucus site at a specific time, and who would be 18 years old by November 4, 2008, regardless of party affiliation, as Washington has no party registration. All voters had to sign an oath stating that they are Democratic and will not participate in another party's voting process: "I declare that I consider myself to be a DEMOCRAT and I will not participate in the nomination process of any other political party for the 2008 Presidential election." However, claims are not verified and there is no penalty if caught breaking one's oath. A primary election, which the citizens of Washington lobbied for and asked the state legislature to fund, will be held February 19; however, the Democratic Party has said it will ignore the results of the primary and instead award all delegates via the caucus results. [3] The democratic "election" will cost about $10 million. It is widely held that the unique situation of holding a primary election whose results are ignored is the result of an ongoing battle of wills between the state's Democratic Party and the (Republican) Secretary of State. [4]

The Washington caucus has unique rules that differ from other Democratic caucuses. The first round of voting is tabulated when voters sign in and indicate, next to their name, date of birth and other demographic information, their candidate preference. Per state law, absentee votes are permitted for active military service members, the medically disabled and for religious observance reasons, provided such ballots were mailed no later than February 1, 2008.[5] In some caucus groups, members split into smaller groups according to whichever candidate they support. In other caucus groups, that does not happen. Voters supporting non-viable candidates have an option of moving into viable groups, and voters in viable groups can change their preference.[6] However, there is no 15% threshold rule for allocation of delegates to the legislative district caucus, unlike other Democratic caucuses. Rules state that any fractional delegates remaining are awarded to the candidate with the most votes that do not have delegates.[7] In actuality, groups decide for themselves how to handle split votes, such as through majority vote to determine which candidate gets all the delegates.

Many Washington state voters object to this process: it systematically excludes minority votes from the tabulation, resulting in voters feeling disenfranchised by a system that not only favors the privileged (and those who are free to spend hours at the event) but also disregards the wishes of the minority voters. [8] Some citizens, by law, are prevented from participating in caucuses at all (for example, some judges), and therefore completely disenfranchised from even casting a ballot. Others are concerned about the lack of privacy in the process, for instance reporters or police officers, who for professional reasons are not in a position to reveal their private policitcal choices. There is no option for casting a secret ballot in this process. [9] Voters may choose to draft a resolution to change the election process, although the state's Democratic Party has said it will ignore any resolutions that call for changing the current system. [10]

I've made an attempt to deal with some of this, but more work is needed. I've also reorganized the article around the caucus process. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 23:06, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Also, there is a specific history of this issue in Washington. Rather than much of this generic "primary vs. caucus" material, perhaps it would be better to include information about this debate as it has developed specifically in Washington. Here's a relevant article: [1] --Bryan H Bell (talk) 23:19, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I find this whole section unnecessary and not in the spirit of the article's purpose. Is this article providing more detailed election results or an editorial rant on primaries v. caucuses? How does this content specifically pertain to the 2008 Washington Democratic elections? I've removed it until someone reverts my changes.  :) JakeZ (talk) 10:53, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Explaining vote breakdown

Should something be added that all the candidates appeared in the voter pamplet and that might explain why so many votes went to men no longer in the race. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.187.151.60 (talk) 04:49, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

County Conventions

All delegate allocations are determined by the Precinct, LD and CD Caucuses, with the remainder chosen at the State Convention. No delegates are chosen at the County Conventions. Although some LD Caucuses are held in conjunction with the County Conventions, they are separate events. So the delegate breakdown "from the county conventions" is misleading.

Should we just delete that section and explain above? Chadlupkes (talk) 04:55, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

This makes sense to me. We don't neccessarily need to delete the whole section, but we should certainly delete the table, since no national delegates are selected at the county conventions per se. Then again, in Eastern washington a couple of the Legislative districts are spread over several counties, and thus one LD's delegates were selected at several different county conventions, and thus it would be a way of tabulating the results for those spread out LD's. The table should be changed to reflect this, perhaps. Benjaminady (talk) 19:55, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree. I've taken a crack at combining the Legislative District caucus and Count Convention sections. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 22:18, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The pledged delegate count

Does anyone have a problem switching the count on this page to 53/25 Obama/Clinton? I realize that almost all the mainstream media sources have it at 52/26. Only CNN has it right. But I live in Washington state, and we've been collecting results from the Legislative district cauccuses--we have about 75% of the results from LD caucuses compiled so far, and Obama is basically picking up all the Edwards and Kucinich people, and the break is about 70%/30% so far, and so it looks like *minimum* he'll get 53 at state, probably actually it will be 54/24. The Washington State Democratic party is *super* disorganized, in some ways, so they're not getting results up, but you can track a lot of them via blogs and so forth, from the LD caucuses which took place mostly on April 5th and 12th and 19th (with just a couple stragglers still upcoming). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjaminady (talk • contribs) 15:46, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

The criteria for adding stuff to wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. So unless we have a reliable source explaining why the change occured, we really shouldn't use CNN's numbers, since they are the "odd one out". Andareed (talk) 19:38, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

If you're suggesting changing the delegate count listed in the 'Precinct caucuses' table, then I oppose switching the count. The source for the delegate count in that table is an official announcement from the Washington State Democratic Party, a primary source. I think primary sources should be preferred over secondary sources such as CNN. I feel strongly that we should not change delegate counts in the result tables of past contests. Instead, when subsequent contests alter the delegate count, we should post them in the result tables of the appropriate contest. That way, we have a historical record of the delegate count as it changed from contest to contest. However, we should only post updates in the result tables of subsequent contests after we have located reliable sources for the numbers (preferably the WA State Democratic Party). On Wikipedia, blogs are not typically considered to be reliable sources. I understand the desire to post the most up to date information here, but with Wikipedia a little patience is in order. It is, after all, an encyclopedia, not a newspaper. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 20:07, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

No not about the precinct. That is right. I'm talking about how many national delegates will end up getting elected for each (out of the total 78) based on the results of the Legislative District caucuses over the last three weeks. I've started imputting those numbers in the LD caucus table. It's kewl. You'll see once all the numbers are in that clearly the national delegate breakdown will be definitely 53/25, and lot more likely it will be 54/24. Based on the LD (second tier) caucus results. It's kind of like what happened in Iowa, only not so dramatic, and a lot less covered by the media. I suspect the Iowa democratic party is a lot more organized than Washington. It would be difficult for that not to be the case, actually. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjaminady (talk • contribs) 07:00, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Benjaminady, I'm glad to see that you're motivated to improve this article, but I'm concerned that you may be frustrated if we end up deleting all your hard work. The reason this may happen is because you haven't (so far) provided information in the article that lets readers see the source(s) of your data. Without listing your sources, there's no way for readers or other editors to verify that the information you've supplied is accurate. If adequate sources can't be found for information, it is usually removed. Also, the source(s) you provide should be reliable, which means third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, such as the web sites of major news outlets like CNN or CBS News. As I said above, blogs are not usually an adequate source. Your own personal research is also not an acceptable source of information in Wikipedia. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 07:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Bryan. Thank you. I am fairly new to *editing* wikipedia, although I use it rather a lot. So a couple questions. Do reports on the web pages of the democratic parties for the legislative districts consitute verifiability? For instance here http://www.46dems.com/2008/ldcaucusresults.php the 46th LD dems have the results posted on their web page. I have a few sources like that, and then some other sources from local newspapers. And secondly, can you help me in terms of *adding* the sources? I mean can you show me how to do just the first one, then I can follow the format you used to add the others? I assume there should be a superscript number somewhere then the source listed as a footnote? I have no idea how to do that. Maybe you could do it for the 46th? Then I could start adding other sources? Or can we get an editor/higher up to help show us one? Or do I need to go to some other wiki page and study the code a little bit to see how to do it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjaminady (talk • contribs) 15:59, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to the wild world of editing Wikipedia, Benjaminady. The sources you mentioned should work well. I'd be happy to help you with citing your sources. You can read about how to do it at WP:CITE. There's also a handy list of citation templates at WP:CITET. Since most sources come from web sites, you'll usually find yourself using the cite web template. Thus, you'll usually add the following text next to the information you've added (filling in the details that are particular to your source):

<ref>{{cite web |last= |first= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title= |publisher= |date= |url= |format= |accessdate= }}</ref>

As you've requested, I'll add a sample citation for the 46th LD. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 21:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

(undent) I've moved the rest of the sources into inline citations, but some still need to be completely filled out. There are still 8 rows of data missing sources and some of the sources are pretty sketchy, particularly the ones for LD18, which are blog entries. Also, there are still many rows with no data at all. I've been giving this revised table some leeway to see if it turns into something useful, but to be frank, I'm starting to wonder if this article might be better off without it. It just might not be possible to find reliable sources for a results table with this much detail. We may be better off reverting to the original high-level results table and simply waiting for the Washington State Dems (or some other reliable source) to release the final results. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 06:37, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Bryan--It's a slow process, but we're making progress. The wa-dems aren't really promising to even release the results at all--I spoke to someone on the phone there today. So this might be our only place to tally them. If you're planning to actually delete the table, can you give us some warning, at least, so I can save all of it (especially the references) locally first, so as not to lose it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjaminady (talk • contribs) 19:36, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, if it's true that WA Dems won't be publishing state-wide results, let's give this table some more time to develop. But in the meantime let's first get the missing sources added and find some better sources to replace the blog sources. As far as saving your work, don't worry. One of the cool things about Wikipedia is that nothing is every permanently deleted. All previous versions of each article are saved. If I were to delete the table but we later decided to restore it, we could either undo the edit in which I deleted it, or copy the table from an earlier version of the article. To see what I mean, try clicking on the article tab above and then the history tab. That takes you to the Revision history of Washington Democratic caucuses, 2008 page where you'll see a list of all the changes that have ever been made to the article. If you click on one of the earlier dates in the list of changes, you'll see the way this article looked back on that date. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 20:22, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Bryan--you are amazing. thank you for all the help and work. I just wanted to point out that the reason that the delegate count was wrong for LD47 was a simple math error (27+11=38, not 48) =). It's kind of funny in one sense that certain sources are considered ... "unreliable", when wikipedia itself is still (and in my opinion this is actually pretty stupid) banned from being used as a reference in most academic papers--at least at UW, which is one of the top research universities in the country. I suspect that both of these things will gradually change. Blogs will be accepted as more reliable, as will wikipedia. But I could be wrong =). Benjaminady (talk) 18:42, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Oops, sorry I didn't notice that the LD47 row was a math error. Regardless, I think we should leave the data out since its source was little more than an eyewitness account of the event. There's no evidence that the author's facts were checked or subjected to review prior to being posted, which makes errors (intentional or accidental) more likely. It would be better to wait until we find a source that's subject to review (such as a major newspaper) or from an authority on the data (such as the WA Dems or 47th District Democrats organizations).

I disagree that Wikipedia's reputation as a reliable source itself should be an excuse for any lack of rigor on the part of its editors when selecting sources. On the contrary, improving Wikipedia's reputation depends on its editors choosing good sources and avoiding questionable ones. I also must say that regardless of any academic institution's policy, I would not cite Wikipedia as a source in an academic paper I was writing. Wikipedia is an excellent place to begin when researching a topic, but it is only a beginning. I feel that adequate research requires delving into the primary and secondary sources on a topic. Anything less is, in my book, academic and intellectual laziness. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 00:17, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The LD Caucus Table

Would it be okay with everybody for me to expand the LD Caucus table, adding 18 more columns showing the Obama and Clinton delegates from each LD caucus which were elected to each of the 9 Congressional District Caucuses (to be held May 17th)? That would let us get a feel for how many delegates are going to show up at each of the 9 CD caucuses, and many (even most) of the sources we are using have it broken down by CD already.

Of course in a mere 3 days we'll have results from the CD caucuses, in terms of how many national delegates they elect. It would be more for ... keeping track of the history, as it were. Benjaminady (talk) 06:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

First, though I was initially skeptical about your recent restructuring of the LD caucus table, I think it turned out to be useful after all. Thanks for the work you've done. (By the way, thanks for being more dilligent about sourcing the material you've recently added.) That said, I would prefer we didn't expand it in the way you describe here. The table as it stands now, while useful, is probably at its limit of providing notable detail. Further expansion would probably be too much detail and tip the table too far in the direction of non-notability. On a related subject, I think the CD caucus table as you finally ended up configuring it looks pretty good. --Bryan H Bell (talk) 23:21, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Okay--kewl--that makes sense.Benjaminady (talk) 05:39, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

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