Fast forward 4 years, and you can imagine the growth in support. The Campaign For Liberty was alive and progressing this whole time. Now back to the recent vote. I’ll skip the details on my caucus and get right to the differences and observations I made that night. In order to vote, you do not need to be registered Rep. You only have to have a state ID along with proof of residency, which could be as simple as a phone or utility bill. I made it clear to all my friends and family that is all they needed. The 2nd most important part is finding your caucus location. That’s where I encountered all the problems. Up to this point, the Romney-endorsing Des Moines Register has always released the caucus locations in a full page ad prior to the caucus. Apparently, this time around the Republican Party had to pay for the ad, whereas the Register normally covered that. It came last minute, and it came tiny. I guess this 1 day local newspaper ad cost too much cashola this time around for the Rep Party to purchase. Inflation? Lack of funds? Not a bigger blank spot in that failing newspaper? I’m guessing not. Every friend/family member I knew that lived in an apartment/duplex had problems finding their location. I was getting calls all the way up to my speech about this. Feverously texting, I tried to help my friends. Finally I gave up and called HQ myself. Whoever answered the phone was no help at all. They were unwilling to help and told me to run the addresses through ronpaul2012.com. Obviously I had done that, along with the GOP and Secretary of State’s websites. My cousin got the same result. They even told him not to bother going because it was 6:30 and too late to vote. That’s after telling him his polling location was on the other side of town far away from his zip code. So while I was supposed to be identifying RP supporters in my precinct to get them to stick around and be delegates, I was instead trying to help others with the easiest part of this whole process. Where do I vote? Apparently the news was no help either. My cousin and his RP supporting roommate flipped news channels for an hour hoping to get any help. There goes 2 potential delegates down the hole. Luckily, last minute another one of my friends found a helpline on the internet somewhere and got a straight answer right away and rushed to his location to make it just in time. Ron Paul won that friend’s precinct, by the way, along with most of the others I’m hearing about from friends and family and fellow Ron Paul supporters in Des Moines. Finding voter locations was my main obstacle, but others were experiencing their own. I mostly heard reports of precincts winning, but then RP supporters not staying around to be nominated for or to vote for delegates. That’s another problem I had. 35 votes and only 3 of the Ron Paul supporters I recognized stuck around. With that being said, there were still plenty of others getting those delegate positions. Just log into the DM for Ron Paul Facebook page. There were multiple reports of victories and delegate positions obtained everywhere I looked. I felt I had not accomplished my goal since I was only an alternate delegate. Thankfully, my girlfriend had a similar experience as I did in 2008, and won over a handful of people with her speech. She landed not only a delegate position, but also a spot on the platform committee. To read more about her experience you can read her blog, My Thorns Have Roses, where she has highlighted the recent political events here in Iowa in her last couple of posts.