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Kat and I went to the Washington Caucus yesterday. This write up in slate captures many good points and is aligned with what I observed.

It was not at all as bad as what I have be angry about over the past few months. The key thing is that in a 1 out of a 100 occurrence, the Washington Caucus actually mattered, and the whole neighborhood seemed to have turned out. The local school that held ours was overflowing. I suspect they were 3-4x over the fire code and they still had a line of people looping around 3 sides of the block when they started going (I’m pretty sure they managed to get everyone registered). I read some press reports quoting party folks saying the turnout was twice normal- the only folks I’d talked to at the actual event who had been to a caucus since 1968 said it was more like 10x normal or more.

As Slate said it was “more like a really disorganized primary”. There was some premise of speeches in theory trying to convince the undecided voters, but as Kat observed they ended up being directed more at the “other side” and didn’t really sway anyone. The group of undecided folks in our precinct was small enough anyway that they didn’t really matter at the end.

So a couple of observations-

1) I’ll retract my previous comments about the evils of the caucus system. I still don’t love it- it excludes people who are out of town on business that day. It excludes people who have to work that day (there were reminders on the radio about leaving plenty of time to take the bus, but no reminders that the bus-drivers don’t get a vote). I don’t really feel like it added much over the primary system beyond the overall cool vibe that we were watching democracy in action with the whole neighborhood getting together.

2) I had a conversation with a party official about the nomination process a couple of months ago. One of the key points he made defending the role of Iowa and New Hampshire is that those states take their role (often choosing the nominees) very seriously. Yesterday made it clear to me that Washington State takes that role just as seriously when given the chance. Hence its even more important to focus on breaking the strangle-hold that Iowa and New Hampshire have on our process.

3) The super-delegate system is still very sketchy. I wish more of the super delegates would take the attitude that Barbara Boxer did when she announced before the California primary that her vote was going to go with whichever way the state popular vote went. It seems like we may be very much on track to have one candidate win the most delegates from the votes of the people but the other candidate win based on the super delegates.

Complaining about the mass media doing a poor job is like shooting fish in a barrel. Mostly I leave it to A Daily Show and the Colbert Report. But this one I’ve got to comment on.

I’m really annoyed by all the coverage of New Hampshire. To read the headlines it would seem like Hillary Clinton had a huge defeat of Barack Obama. She did “win”, but by 2 percentage points. But, and this is a big one, both Iowa and New Hampshire are not winner take all states- you get delegates proportional to your votes. So Obama’s “big win” in Iowa gave him 16 delegates to Clinton’s 15. And in New Hampshire, they each got 9. In other words, in the real impact, its a tie.

Meanwhile, to hear the pundits talk about it, Mitt Romney is just sucking wind, with two second place finishes. Again, until you look at the delegate count and see that he is leading with 24, compared to Huckabee in 2nd place with 18. It is just AMAZING that no one in the press has mentioned this (that I’ve seen, but granted I have very little patience for the inane commentary on TV, so my sources are the NY Times, Slate, etc).

Furthermore I continue to be annoyed with the way that the press and politicians are barely covering the big scandal, which is how Iowa and New Hampshire continue to use thuggish tactics to maintain their up front primary and caucus roles, disenfranchising 99% of the US population from much of the election process. These two states are a very poor representation of America. They are both more than 95% white, to the extent that they have any minorities, they don’t represent the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who are becoming very much a part of America, and even more important to me, they don’t have ANY major cities (the closest either comes are the parts of New Hampshire that are effectively Boston suburbs and those are pretty far out there). Some of the key political issues are involving the differences between urban and rural issues and to let two states with no major cities have this kind of role is crazy for a society where more and more of the population is living in those big cities.

I’ll save complaining about the caucus system (typical voter turnout- 1-3%), for another post.

But the bottom line is that the major politicians and the party infrastructure both kiss these states butts, and it really has to stop. The extreme here is the way the Democrats have pretty much banned their candidates from campaigning in Michigan or Florida. Are they crazy??? Florida, hmmm, that really sounds like a good state to piss off the electorate.

There are several good proposals of rotating regional primary days that can give fair opportunities to various regions of the country and keep things so that candidates don’t have to criss-cross the country constantly. Maybe now that Iowa and New Hampshire are behind us we can have some leaders with the guts to proclaim 2008 the last election where these guys go first.

Everyone should read this.

Years ago I registered to vote by absentee ballot all the time. Its much easier to get the ballet in the mail, have a chance to study the candidates and issues with a computer nearby and make my decisions.

Today is a primary election in King County and the mail-in ballot at a reminder to remove the stub (tiny extra piece of paper) from your ballot or else it might push your postage over $.41 (a normal stamp). Which brings up a better question- why do you have to pay postage to vote anyway? Voting is our most basic government function and as mail-in voting becomes more commonplace, doesn’t the postage become a form of (very small) poll tax?

So let’s get our elections commissions to solve this problem- either via pre-paid postage envelopes or better yet a national postal service rule that ballots don’t require postage (much like congress gets to send free mail).

The HBO special “Hacking the Vote” is online now on Google video. There are few things
more important to our democracy than the basic fairness of the elections- that every vote gets counted and that
every citizen is given a fair opportunity to cast the ballot that they want to cast.

Related to this I wanted to raise another issue. Increasingly people are switching to mail-in ballots and in
Seattle this year the ballot is so thick that it requires two stamps. Granted, people have the opportunity to go
vote in person without paying anything, but given how much we save with the mail-in-ballots, shouldn’t the
state be paying for the postage? That would also reduce the opportunities for votes to be lost due to mailing
errors (although I do understand that the postal service is going to deliver ballots even if they don’t have enough
postage).

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I mostly try to avoid addressing political issues here and usually find conspiracy theories
uninteresting outside of episodes of 24.
However this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone
raises some important questions on what happened during the 2004 election. The biggest scandal here is
how little attention any of the incidents outlined in this article have gotten from the media so far.
Given the direction that the media has taken lately Im curious how much this will be picked up by the
key news outlets- The NY Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. Furthermore as far as I can tell,
its two years later, another set of elections are coming up and so far nothing at all has changed to
prevent any of this stuff from happening again..

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