Caucus

Dustin and I went to Idaho's first caucus! It was so exciting!...well not really. We live in Bonneville county, so we had to vote at the Civic Auditorium. Doors opened at 4:00 pm and voting would start at 7:00. We got there at 5 and it was already extremely crowded! I felt like I was kissing the people next to me, they were so close and squished! Thank goodness I had gum in my mouth. We FINALLY reached the front of the line to give them our registration forms and show them our licenses and they denied us! With us recently getting married, we didn't have our current address and I still hadn't gotten my last name changed on my license. So they told us to go home and get a piece of mail with our new address and my new last name. Dustin was furious! Ha ha, I had to calm him down so he wouldn't yell at the nice old ladies helping us. So at about 5:45 we left our apartment again to get through the dreaded crowd with all of our information. By the time we got back it was around 6 and the line to get in the building, turned into two lines that wrapped around the block! I almost gave up and went home. It was freezing outside! After 45 minutes of waiting we finally got through the line! The Civic Auditorium was completely full and so we had to go to a gym. Our gym was completely full and they filled up another gym! There were almost 5,000 people there, and still had to turn people away because there wasn't enough room. I would've been upset if that was me who got turned away.

                                                Dustin was very excited to be there.

This was a panoramic picture I took of part of the gym we were in. They had the little blue voting booths on the sides of the gym. We walked behind it with a 50 cent piece and put it in a bucket of the candidate we wanted to vote for. Notice the nice lady to Dustin's left? She was nice...too nice! She talked forever and ever! I felt like the last hour I had come to the caucus alone, Dustin and I couldn't slip one word to each other! It was a long hour. We watched a little video clip or listened to a representative speaker for all of the candidates and then we started our voting around 7:30. It took so long to finally get the results! At about 10 we got the news! Of course, Mitt Romney won! He got just over 3,000 votes, Ron Paul came in 2nd and then Rick Santorum in 3rd, Gingrich in 4th and then some candidate I didn't even know existed. (Who got 3 votes out of the 5,000, must've been some of his family.) It was a long night but a new experience. Now I'll know what to expect next time, if we have the opportunity to attend another caucus!