UPDATE: Here is my report on the rescheduled caucus held on April 10. This time there was no fraudulent activity or broken rules and delegates were successfully selected.

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I’ve heard accusations of voter fraud in the Republican nominating process, almost always from Ron Paul supporters, and I never know if they’re just misinterpreting things or not understanding caucus rules or seeing what they want to see due to their bias when Paul doesn’t get as much support as they think he should.

Well, today I definitely witnessed blatant caucus fraud in my county. I’m not calling it voter fraud because, well, we never got to vote on anything….

The caucus was supposed to start at 10AM, but there were still long lines and they announced that everyone would be allowed in even though the event would start later and it was still supposed to be over by 1PM. (Turnout was probably a lot more than they were expecting. Police reported 2,500 but organizers said less than 1,000.)

So far so good, I thought, at least we won’t have any complaints about people getting turned away because they didn’t wake up early enough.

Sometime after 11AM they finally began to call the meeting to order. There was a temporary chairman, some local guy named Eugene Dokes, who was supposed to let everyone vote for a chairman as the first order of business. A political friend told me the chairman more or less controls the meeting, so the campaigns try hard to get one of their guys in as a chairman. (Some Ron Paul guys were actually handing out sheets in line telling supporters who to vote for chairman. They had a pretty good organization.)

First, though, Dokes went over some “non-negotiable house rules.” (It might have been the teacher from the high school that went over the rules. I actually think they might have taken turns as things got disruptive.) No food or beverage, turn off cell phones, no recording devices (except for “pre-approved media” people, of course). Everyone seemed OK about the food, but the recording devices rule really didn’t sit well with the crowd.

One guy refused to put his camera away, and Dokes refused to continue the meeting until he did. The crowd was booing the rule and chanting all kinds of things like “remove the chair” and “we make the rules.” Oh boy, I thought, here go Paul supporters looking disruptive again. But I was surprised to see Romney people just as agitated as the Paul supporters. And the crowd was being encouraged (as if they needed it) by a woman in front with a Romney sign and Romney sticker.

Well, they called some more cops in, and eventually everyone settled down and we did the pledge and invocation and it looked like the selection process was going to start. But instead of allowing a vote for chairman, Dokes rattled off some names of people he was appointing to various roles for the meeting (in this YouTube clip, you can hear him appointing a parliamentarian (sp?) at 0:20 and members of the credentials committee around 1:12). Apparently the elected chairman is actually supposed to appoint those people, but Dokes ignored the loud objections from the crowd.

Finally, he said it was time to select a chairman. A large portion of the crowd was audibly chanting “Brent Stafford” (the guy on the Paul sheet), but Dokes named some other guy, Matt Ehlen, and asked for Ayes and Nays and then said “The Ayes have it.”

A lot of people in the crowd objected and yelled out “Division” or whatever they’re supposed to yell to dispute an Aye/Nay vote, which means they’re supposed to count hands. Dokes ignored this as well. Paul supporters and Romney supporters were getting pretty outraged.

The guy at the mic (I forget if it was Dokes or Ehlen; I’ve seen claims of both but consensus is trending towards Ehlen) claimed the cops were gonna shut the place down if people didn’t behave. The crowd kept making lots of noise and suddenly the guy said something like “I entertain a motion to adjourn this meeting.” Somebody seconded it. He asked for Ayes and Nays again. This time I am absolutely certain the Nays were louder. The Ayes were audible, but the sound of the Nays physically hurt my ears.

But the guy adjourned the meeting and said it was all over and that our county would have no delegates! Then as people stayed outraged and refused to leave, they said if we didn’t leave we were trespassers who would be arrested. We finally vacated the building to see over a dozen cop cars as well as a police helicopter circling overhead.

To be fair, the crowd was pretty raucous while a lot of these things were going on, and it was hard to even hear what the guys at the mic were saying sometimes. Paul supporters complained that the local committee repeatedly ignored Robert’s Rules of Order, but I’m pretty sure mob-chanting “we make the rules” isn’t part of those Rules of Order, either. But I know without a shadow of a doubt that they at least violated the caucus rules that were clearly posted outside the gymnasium.

They appointed some members they wanted before selecting a chairman, selected a caucus chairman who did not have a clear majority of the caucusgoers, refused to put it up to a counted vote, and then adjourned the meeting despite the overwhelming objection of the caucusgoers.

After the meeting, the Romney and Paul campaigns were trying to get everyone to call the local and national GOP offices to complain about the blatant violations of the local party officials.

Rumors are that the local officials wanted to tilt the election to Santorum, so they tried to appoint their guys into the caucus positions instead of letting everyone vote on it, and maybe they tried to ban recording devices so no one could document it.

I have no idea if these rumors are true, but they don’t sound unreasonable. Santorum carried the state with over half the vote in the meaningless primary last month, and it makes sense that local officials who support him would be concerned about other candidates controlling the caucus and securing the delegates. And it would explain why the Romney camp was also so upset about the proceedings.

Apparently the Paul and Romney camps colluded to minimize Santorum’s outcome, but whether this was a result of the local committee’s plans to break the procedural rules, as Brent Stafford claims, or the incentive for them to break the rules, we may never know.

Maybe it was a little of both. It sounds like the pro-Santorum officials wanted a chairman who would appoint delegates proportionally based on the possibly illegal “straw poll” we took via sign-up sheets at the beginning. The Paul and Romney camps wanted a chairman who would possibly split delegates between them and shut Santorum out; this was technically legal but arguably less “fair”. However, it should also be noted that Santorum benefited from a technical rule that kept Gingrich off last month’s primary ballot, and I haven’t heard any of his fans complaining about that.

Unfortunately media accounts so far seem to be focusing on the disruption caused by the no-camera rule, as if Paul supporters just didn’t like that and it’s their fault for almost rioting and ruining the meeting. The media is not focusing on the second disruption (after everyone calmed down and we said the pledge) caused by the violated caucus rules.

USAToday (yes, we made national news) does this, quoting Dokes as thinking “there was the possibility of someone trying to inflict personal injury or harm to me.” The crowd was definitely unruly and I could see how he might have been frightened, but I believe that unruliness was caused by Dokes repeatedly violating the caucus rules.

So what happens now? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch initally reported this:

Eugene Dokes, the county GOP committee chairman, said he talked with state party officials shortly after the caucus broke up about figuring out another way to determine who St. Charles County will send to the district and statewide conventions that will pick national convention delegates. Another countywide caucus or township caucuses are possibilities, Dokes said, but no decision has been made.

After an update, however, the article quotes party chairman David Cole saying,

“the State Party plans to reach out to all parties involved. We will come to an agreement to ensure that St Charles County is fully represented throughout the nominating process.”

Regardless of the Santorum rumors, which may be completely false, this caucus fraud certainly does not follow the conspiracy narrative about Republican elites trying to rig elections for Romney. If anything, it’s just a case of local officials trying to influence the event for their preferred candidate. Some of the alleged fraud cases in other states may be similar. Note that most of the Missouri caucuses happened without incident.

I’ve tried to piece together an accurate summary based on my memory, video clips, and other online accounts, but if you were there and have a correction to anything I wrote above, please let me know in the comments.

Next: Lessons In Bias and Local Politics From the Caucus