Inside Packetland: Prepping The Huge Logistics Of Caucus Night

The packets the Polk County Democrats will send to the largest of their 177 precincts in preparation for caucus night weigh as much as a baby each.

They’ll weigh in at nearly 20 pounds once they’re ready to go.

“The fact that we even call them a packet — these are boxes,” said Judy Downs, executive director of the Polk County Democrats. “It used to be your script, some voter registration forms and your reporting forms, and now it’s just a whole bunch of stuff.”

Downs and her volunteers were in the midst of what party staffers often call “packetland” last week, the mass stuffing of packets of materials for every precinct chair to run their caucus effectively.

The presidential campaigns have their own separate packetland operations to outfit their precinct captains, prepping boxes of voter lists, campaign buttons and placards, talking points and more. Most then drive the boxes out from headquarters in giant U-haul trucks to every county in the state.

There are quite a few new informational items added to the boxes for the Polk County Democrats this year, including agendas for the night written in both English and Spanish. Polk County is also adding stickers for observers and reporters so it is obvious who should get counted and who shouldn’t.

Voter preference cards, one of the biggest rule changes to the 2020 caucuses, will also be included.

On the preference cards, caucus-goers will indicate their first- and second-choice candidates as a way to create a paper trail for campaigns if they request a recount, a new measure mandated by the DNC this year.

Downs said one of the trickiest parts about the boxes is making sure the correct amount of materials are put in each one.

Des Moines Precinct 62, which covers the Waterbury neighborhood of Des Moines, will likely have Polk County’s largest turnout this year. The precinct will send 19 delegates to its county convention and has a state delegate equivalent of 5.32. In comparison, the entirety of rural Wayne County, down on the Missouri border, has a state delegate equivalent of just 3.

In Polk County, the rural Granger precinct is one of the smallest, electing just a single delegate to the county convention, with a state delegate equivalent of 0.28.

It was difficult to estimate how many materials each site needs, because of the significant population growth the Des Moines metro has seen in recent years. After redistricting happens following the 2020 census, Downs estimates there will be 40 more precincts in Polk County.

“That’s one of the reasons why this is hard, because it’s year nine of a census,” Downs said. “So, the precincts are so disproportionately drawn right now because we haven’t had that recalibration of redistricting.”

Downs ultimately used a “doomsday number” to figure out how many materials each box needed. The doomsday number equates to 85% of registered Democrats and non-party voters in the precinct. Democrats have never seen that high of a turnout.

Downs said she also had to figure out who would retrieve all the boxes and packets after caucus night.

Her team has worked on finding precinct chairs since she began her job in February 2019.

Once she recruited those chairs, Downs started hosting training sessions, or mock caucuses.

The training sessions were mandatory for every precinct chair this year because there were so many rule changes since the 2016 caucuses.

“We thought that when we made it mandatory that every caucus chair attend a training that there’d be some push back from folks who have been doing it for literally 30 years, and there was none,” Downs said. “Everyone is super committed on making it go smoothly. After some stress in 2016, our volunteers want all the training they can get.”

Downs was hopeful the training and new materials handed out this year would be beneficial for everyone.

“My hope is that it’s clear from the jump that the party has done everything it can to make the caucuses be more efficient, more transparent and more accessible,” Downs said.

By Paige Godden
Posted 1/27/20