Easily Swayed

I participated in this year's State Republican Convention as a State Delegate. I was among around 3000 such delegates from across the State. It was the first time I have done this. It was very educational and interesting to be a part of it and learn some things about how the political system works. There were a couple of things that stood out to me. Here is one of them.

As delegates, our main job was to select the Republican candidates for a variety of State-wide and National positions, as well as our local US Congressman. This was done in multiple rounds of balloting. There was also some Republican Party business that we participated in.

At one point in the convention, we were in the second or third round of balloting and two people messed up. They cast their ballots incorrectly. We had two ballots to cast and we were supposed to drop both of them in the ballot box. After casting them, our delegate credentials that we wore around our necks were marked as having cast our ballots. This is done to prevent people from cheating and casting more ballots than allowed. Anyway, these two people cast one ballot, got there credentials marked, and then got back in line to cast the second ballot. When they got up to the ballot box, they were denied, since their credentials were already marked.

The current business that we were dealing with in the meeting was interrupted and one of the guys in charge explained what had happened. He said that in order to allow the second ballot to be cast for these two people, we had to vote on it and as a majority override the Republican Party Convention rules. One person spoke in favor of allowing these ballots to be counted explaining that these people were confused, etc. and another person spoke against it, stating that we have rules for a reason and that these people should have been paying better attention. Then we voted by holding our credential card up in the air above our heads. The vast majority voted against the ballots being allowed, so these ballots were "spoiled" and not counted.

10 or 15 minutes later, the same guy in charge interrupted what we were doing and asked us to revisit the issue of these two spoiled ballots. He explained that so-and-so was 73 years old, had come a long way to participate and that it would be a shame to not allow his/her ballot to be counted. The other person was 80 something in a similar situation. They were just confused about how the balloting was supposed to happen. He asked us to have some mercy along with our justice. Something like that.

So after his speech, he called for the vote again. How would you have voted? Well, this time, the vote passed by what appeared to be about 95-99%. I was among just a handful of delegates that still held my credentials above my head voting against it. It's not that I didn't feel bad for these people. I did feel bad for them, but we have rules for a reason. It was more of a "principle of the thing" for me and also the fact that I did not personally know these people. I had no way to judge whether they were being honest. I guess one could argue that one of the rules is that the rules can be overridden by a majority vote in certain situations and that this rule is there for a reason too. I'm sure there are good arguments on both sides of this particular issue.

The real interesting/scary thing to me in all of this, though, is how easily swayed people are. In a matter of 15 minutes, one man with a 2 minute speech changed the votes of 3000 people!