Texas Caucus Results Due March 29
03.11.08 -- 6:36 PM
Curious whether Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton won Texas' Democratic caucuses March 4? The official results won't be available until March 29.
Until then, the last reported results - from 41 percent of the precinct caucuses - show Obama ahead with 56 percent to Clinton's 44 percent.
Obama has won at least 31 delegates from the caucuses and Clinton has won at least 27, according to The Associated Press count. The remaining nine delegates will be awarded after the official results are announced at the end of the month.
The state Democratic Party gave up Monday on its effort to produce a running public tally of the count. The state party had set up a reporting system, outside the official count, that relied on 8,247 precinct chairmen to voluntarily call their results to 254 county chairmen who would relay them to state party headquarters.
But an estimated 1 million Democrats - far more than ever before - showed up for the caucuses, which were held right after voting ended in the first part of the Democratic contest: a standard primary administered by state government.
The huge turnout played havoc with the caucuses, creating confusion, long waits and even a few calls to the police to calm frustrations late on March 4. It hasn't made the count any easier either.
"This was a turnout that was more than anybody would have imagined," state party spokesman Hector Nieto said as he announced the party was giving up on the voluntary public tally with fewer than half the precincts having reported. He said the last significant batch of returns were called in last Thursday and the calls had petered out since then.
The party had organized the voluntary reporting system at the request of news organizations.
Now the party will rely on the official system laid down in its rules. Those rules require only that precinct chairmen mail the results of their caucuses to their county party chairmen 72 hours after primary election day. County chairmen don't have to reveal those results until county or state Senate district conventions March 29.
As in many states with caucuses, these district conventions pick delegates to a state convention in June which picks the actual national convention delegates. The Associated Press uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support doesn't change during this multistage process.
The caucuses ultimately will allocate 67 delegates to the Democratic national convention this summer.
Clinton won the popular vote in the regular primary that preceded the caucuses. Her 51 percent of the vote, compared to his 47 percent, earned her 65 delegates to his 61.
The overall delegate tally in Texas is tied at 92, pending the outcome of the remaining nine delegates from the caucuses.
Meanwhile, frustrated county chairmen are trying to be patient with volunteer precinct officials swamped by the turnout. They were figuring out Tuesday which precincts mistakenly sent their results to the state rather than the county and why dozens haven't contacted them at all.
Williamson County Democratic Chairman Richard Torres was still missing results from 33 precincts. "I've been on the phone, calling people trying to get the 33," Torres said. "I think we're going to have to search 'em out now."
Houston's 857 precinct results are still coming in, said Harris County Democratic chairman Gerald Birnberg. The count has been slowed because precinct convention chairmen ran out of official sign-in sheets, so they tore "Democrats Vote Here" signs off the wall and scrawled the preferences of caucus-goers in long hand. Birnberg said a dozen workers have put in 12-hour days since March 4 just making sure the paperwork was right, without even counting the votes yet in the state's largest city.
In Hidalgo County, a border stronghold for Clinton, the count has been stymied because Democratic chairman Juan Maldonado changed his cell phone number after losing re-election and wasn't available for several days at his business, a bail-bond office that also offers state teacher certification.
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Associated Press Writers David Pace and Stephen Ohlemacher in Washington, Alicia A. Caldwell in El Paso and Christopher Sherman in McAllen contributed to this report.
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