On The Record: Larry Snook

For this episode of On The Record, we speak with Larry Snook, County Chair for the Grimes County Democratic Party.

What would you say are the primary issues concerning Grimes County?

Gaining good candidates is our main issue in the Party. It is difficult to find people who have the skills and desire to make a difference in the county government, who can take a year out of their lives to run for county government offices. We encourage people to run continuously, not just during elections. We recruit throughout the year so candidates can think about running and the sacrifices that are required to run for a year to gain a public office. To become a candidate takes time to transition and get business and family affairs in order.

We currently need precinct chairs. Three of our precincts need chairs. These are good Democratic precincts. We just can’t seem to find the right person to chair our efforts in that precinct.

Who are some of your political heroes?

Lyndon B. Johnson and Ann Richards, people that really try to do the right thing are my political heroes.

What are you looking forward to in the coming cycle?

I hope we can make our county Party stronger. Last cycle, we made a large mail out to primary voters in the general election so they would feel more connected to the up ballot candidates. We included a picture of local and statewide candidates to our primary voters. I hope we can improve on that effort this year.

What one thing would you say a political organization never has enough of?

We need members in the Party itself. There are 22,000 people in the county and we have 40-50 active participants.

We need to increase our membership to serve better 22,000 people.

How has technology helped your organization?

We started with zero technology two years ago. The County Chair had not attended meetings in Austin, and most people did not understand how primaries work.We did not understand that the Secretary of State provides the funds for the local party to conduct the Primary Election. We now have an office for the Chair, office supplies and a computer with high speed access. That’s going to have a positive effect on our Party workers.

We are having a dickens of a time teaching the difference in the primaries and general elections to the voters here. They do not understand there are two elections going on at the same time. They see a lot of elections in the county throughout the year, in which the county runs the elections and they confuse that with the primary, in which the party chairs run the elections, every other year.

The voters have a tough time understanding that the primary is to select the Party’s candidate to run in the general election.

Added to that, we have purchased the E-Slate machines,which require that the primary election for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to be held at the same location. The machines are controlled by a single controller. There are two election judges with “the authority of a District Judge” in matters of the Election Code in each polling place. The Election Code has not caught up with this problem yet. It is not a joint polling place. It is a Co-located polling place.

We do not have reliable High-speed Internet accessibility in our rural areas, and older generations cannot use the Website effectively, which inhibits reaching the voters by that means.

We used a Yahoo program to create our own Website (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/) from scratch. I’d appreciate any comments anyone may have to improve our site. It is very inexpensive. You can call me at 936-394-5451.

With minimal computer skills I was able to make this site, some might do better, but we are working with what we have, trying to do our best.