Weeks Before Caucus Night

County Training

Training Videos

Ballot Tallying Training

Make sure all the voters in your precinct are well informed about Neighborhood Caucus Night. Here is a suggested marketing plan for Caucus Night:

Things you may need for Caucus Night:

Week of Caucus Night

Get people thinking about Caucus Night. Encourage those considering running for precinct positions to announce that early so that others know and can start asking questions before the night of caucus.

Schedule a visit to your caucus location with the facility.

  • Meet the managers of the facility and share your contact information.
  • Make sure you are aware of any specific rules for using the facility.
  • See the layout of the room. Plan how you will configure the room and where you will put everything:
    • Where will people enter the room?
    • Where will they check-in?
    • Where will Candidate Registration be?
    • Where will the position gathering locations be?
    • Where will the main meeting be held?
    • Where will the candidate board be?
  • Determine what resources you will need from the facility, and make those requests:
    • Tables
    • Chairs
    • White-boards
    • Audio/Visual needs
  • If you will using the internet, test the WiFi from multiple locations in the room.
  • Locate the bathrooms, drinking fountains, and emergency exits.

Resources

Here are some resources for advertising caucus night.

Fillable Caucus Night Flyer PDF:

Maps for precincts can be downloaded from the your County Clerk’s Office Website.

Tallying Preferential Ballots

Preferential Voting is an allowed voting method for Caucus Night. (UTGOP Constitution XII.1.B) The County Party leadership and/or the Caucus Host will decide what voting method will be used. Preferential Ballots allow a voter to only have to fill out one ballot per race, and they do need to tallied properly to have the same result as multi-round voting.

Here are a couple ways you can tally your Preferential Ballots.

Tallying Preferential Ballots by hand is not difficult, if you know the process. Even if you plan to use software for your tallying, you should still learn how to do it by hand in case you have technical problems with the software.

Kirby Glad has created a couple of great videos for you to watch:

  • Video – Preferential Voting for 1 seat positions (18 minutes)
  • Video – Preferential Voting for 2 or more seats (10 minutes)
  • (Please note there is a clarification on these preferential voting videos about handling a tie between two candidates. For example if you have two candidates tied for the lowest number of votes and you must drop one – the video shows flipping a coin, but the correct method is to drop all that are tied, unless it would eliminate the remaining candidates, and THEN flipping a coin.)

Also download the tracking sheet:

The TallyRCV software was developed specifically to tally Preferential Ballots at Caucus Night. It runs on Google Forms and thus has some requirements to be able to use it:

  • A computer with a modern web browser
  • Active Internet Access
  • A Google Account

The template form and instructions document are in this shared Google Drive Folder:

This software allows you to use multiple computers for ballot entry. More details are in the instructions.