caucus

Last weekend Joel and I attended our primary caucus. Washington state is interesting in that it has a caucus and a primary. The democratic party uses the caucus to select all its delegates, while the republican party selects half its delegates from each one. Evidently the political parties wanted to move to caucuses because they were afraid of republicans and independents voting in the primary for the "weak" democrat so the person would be easier to beat. This seems really silly to me because there is no way that the few overzealous non-democrats would gather enough votes to outnumber the democrats. Also, that would prevent them from voting in their own primary and open them up to the same thing. So the real reason behind the move to a caucus in many people's minds is to give more control over the results to party insiders and extremely involved folks. Let me explain why this is why I feel now as well.

The caucus started at 1:00 pm last Saturday. You had to be there by about 1:30 pm to get counted. This eliminates votes from anyone who: works on Saturdays; is not in the area (all absentees, including college students, military personnel, etc); was unable to get to the caucus location (no car, health problems, etc) or had some other conflict and could not devote 2 hours to sitting in a high school cafeteria on a Saturday. So we walked in, signed our name and address, and figured out which precinct we were in. This conveniently gives the democratic party our information - name, phone number, address. We found the table for our precinct and joined other people from our area. From our precinct, there ended up being 18 people present. Our caucus was extremely disorganized. Since this is the first one I have ever attended, I do not know if this is the case everywhere or just at ours. The leaders never fully explained the process and so no one really knew what was going on. The process was supposed to be that everyone votes by secret ballot for who they think should be the nominee, then there is a chance to talk about why you support a candidate, then you vote again. At our table, it did not go that way. People started talking about Clinton vs. Obama, arguing, and generally saying the reasons they hoped their candidate would get nominated. Then we voted. This was awkward for me because at this point I was undecided. Instead of everyone voting again, the lady counting votes said "who was the undecided one" and then everyone tried to convince me to vote for their candidate. I had been nervous about going to the caucus because I didn't want to feel personally pressured to vote one way or the other. When I read the process online I felt like it would be okay, but lo and behold there I was with my neighbors all trying to convince me to vote one way or the other. Eventually we did tally up the votes and it was Clinton 11, Obama 7. Our precinct had 4 delegates to send to the next level of caucuses so we ended up with 2 delegates for Clinton and 2 for Obama.

There is no way that this is a valid democratic process. I left feeling unhappy about the process and what it means for choosing the nominee. Caucuses have been shown to have extremely low participation (in % terms) by potential voters. What about all the people who couldn't make it Saturday? Should 18 people really make the decision for hundreds? In our precinct support for Clinton was stronger but both candidates got the same number of delegates. Obama won Washington state by a huge margin, but I can't help but wonder how many precincts were like ours. Without counting individual votes you lose the will of the people by averaging the votes. Without giving everyone the opportunity to vote in a primary you simply don't count a lot of people. That's my take on the election process here so far. I voted in the primary too even though it won't count, because I think it is important that whoever ends up counting those votes sees what the people really want.