Clark County Nevada Dem. Convention Ends in Chaos

The Clark County Democratic Convention turned into a fiasco Saturday, with a host of problems that were entirely predictable but blithely ignored by county party leadership.

The convention was supposed to elect delegates to this spring’s state convention in Reno, where delegates will be selected for the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Instead, county party leaders, with the annoyed assent of the campaigns of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, suspended voting and moved to reconvene at some future date to vote on state delegates, who will ultimately determine whether Obama or Clinton wins a majority of Nevada’s 25 pledged delegates at the national convention.

Although more than 7,000 delegates to the county convention had been elected at the Jan. 19 caucuses, the county party booked a room at Bally’s with a capacity of 5,000.

Few people expected the 7,000 elected delegates to show, but it was entirely unsurprising that the Clinton and Obama campaigns, locked in a tight delegate battle that could go all the way to the national convention, would call their supporters and tell them to show up at Bally’s so they could be alternates to replace the no-shows.

Sure enough, that’s what happened. There were 6,000 people in the hall when the fire marshal intervened, and Bally’s management estimated 4,000 people in the hallway outside.

The problem was that there wasn’t a clean and credible process for seating alternates.