Caucusing for Obama
Having grown up in Illinois, a primary state, I'd never attended a caucus before. Since I moved to Washington and learned that my primary vote wouldn't count for anything, I decided to go check out the caucus process. And I wasn't alone. It seemed that there were people who had lived here for years, who had never been to a caucus and who also decided that this was the year to come check it out.
It was kind of interesting. And I was actually surprised to see just how many democrats there were in this part of the state and just how many chose to take their Saturday afternoons off to cast a vote and say "Aye" a couple of times. It will be interesting to hear what the actual turnout of voters was. Run smoothly the whole thing could've taken 20-30 minutes. Instead, it took our precinct about 2 hours.
So we gathered, all of these Democrats, in the high school cafeteria. We said the "Pledge of Allegiance" to a tiny flag held out in one hand by a man standing on a bench. We stood around lunch room tables, struggling to hear each other over the din of other precincts discussing their choices, repeating things over and over to an elderly gentleman with a hearing aid in the back. "No, you don't need to choose a candidate." "Yes, you can mark that you are undecided." "If you signed in on a sheet for a different precinct when you arrived, you need to find that sheet and cross yourself off." (I did that one... :P ) And then we cast our votes. Our precinct had 6 delegates to allocate between the 35 people who showed up. Four went to Obama; two went to Clinton. "Is it bad," I thought as I cast my vote, "that I needed to look at the sticker I'm wearing to know how to spell 'Barak'?"
There were a couple of highlights that had nothing to do with who chose who but with who showed up. In my precinct, there was a high school student, who must have just turned 18 or would turn 18 by the election date. She was voted as a delegate to the county caucus, and she was really excited about it. The other story is that I saw a woman there who recently became a citizen, and so she was voting in her first American election.
And while it did get a little boring, like when our windbag precinct chair read aloud to all 35 of us what the precinct should do if only one person showed up to caucus as tables around us cleared to go, I must admit that it was an interesting and a gratifying experience. It was much more gratifying, say, than the isolation of a voting booth, where you fill in a little box and wait for the results to be counted later that night.
It was kind of interesting. And I was actually surprised to see just how many democrats there were in this part of the state and just how many chose to take their Saturday afternoons off to cast a vote and say "Aye" a couple of times. It will be interesting to hear what the actual turnout of voters was. Run smoothly the whole thing could've taken 20-30 minutes. Instead, it took our precinct about 2 hours.
So we gathered, all of these Democrats, in the high school cafeteria. We said the "Pledge of Allegiance" to a tiny flag held out in one hand by a man standing on a bench. We stood around lunch room tables, struggling to hear each other over the din of other precincts discussing their choices, repeating things over and over to an elderly gentleman with a hearing aid in the back. "No, you don't need to choose a candidate." "Yes, you can mark that you are undecided." "If you signed in on a sheet for a different precinct when you arrived, you need to find that sheet and cross yourself off." (I did that one... :P ) And then we cast our votes. Our precinct had 6 delegates to allocate between the 35 people who showed up. Four went to Obama; two went to Clinton. "Is it bad," I thought as I cast my vote, "that I needed to look at the sticker I'm wearing to know how to spell 'Barak'?"
There were a couple of highlights that had nothing to do with who chose who but with who showed up. In my precinct, there was a high school student, who must have just turned 18 or would turn 18 by the election date. She was voted as a delegate to the county caucus, and she was really excited about it. The other story is that I saw a woman there who recently became a citizen, and so she was voting in her first American election.
And while it did get a little boring, like when our windbag precinct chair read aloud to all 35 of us what the precinct should do if only one person showed up to caucus as tables around us cleared to go, I must admit that it was an interesting and a gratifying experience. It was much more gratifying, say, than the isolation of a voting booth, where you fill in a little box and wait for the results to be counted later that night.
posted by Brad Smith at 10:24 AM
2 Comments:
The caucuses always look so interesting. I especially like it when people realize that their candidate isn't going to win and decide to then go over to someone else, either their second choice or to some nobody in order to screw whoever is in the lead. Alas, we still have primaries in NY, so no caucuses for us.
I was there too. I was impressed by the older gentleman from Leavenworth who said he had voted GOP his whole life but was so impressed with Obama's natural talent for leadership. I was not surprised by the bureaucracy and tedium, though my partner Allyson was. I was very pleased to see such high turnout.
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