Super Caucus!

Posted on | February 6, 2008 | 2 Comments

I just returned from my first-ever caucus experience, tucked my exhausted children into bed, and as I promised yesterday, am sitting down to give you the scoop.

There were many things that made the night exciting, like the fact that instead of a teeny little caucus for Precinct 003 (Lyons & immediate surrounds, probably less than 5,000 possible voters all told), this was what they told me was a “Super Caucus” meaning that they lumped most of Boulder County (9 precincts in all) into one big caucus. While it may seem disingenuous for me to complain that my caucus location was less than 3 blocks from my house, I have to say that the Boulder Democratic Party chose a crappy location for this Super Caucus.

Lyons Middle/High School is small at best and does not have good parking or particularly large meeting rooms. The largest room, the gymnasium, was taken up with a girl’s basketball game and, although the cheerleaders lent a festive mood punctuated by a surprisingly-loud buzzer, there just flat wasn’t room for the thousands of people who turned up.

But of course, that’s one of the highlights too: thousands of people turned up. I talked to several precinct leaders who admitted that their entire precinct’s typical caucus turnout was in the single digits. As I mentioned, my precinct represents a tiny area and we had 119 people who braved the freezing cold, the lack of parking, the rather remote location (and, did I mention that the street you turn off of from the highway to get to the High School doesn’t currently have a street sign, making non-Lyons residents’ chances of finding the place fairly slim!?!?).

We walked in at 6:15 and joined the queue to get our little white voter card, then filed into the auditorium. At first I was absolutely inspired. The diversity in the room and the genuine warmth and community spirit on display as neighbors greeted one another, sometimes embracing, other times quietly, modestly squeezing a hand or shoulder of the person sitting next to them, reminded me of what representative government at the local level can feel like. There was no one demographic that dominated the room–young and old were equally present, and from the looks of things, rich and poor were too. The trendy-outdoorsy look that so characterizes the young and upwardly mobile in this area was equally balanced by the cowboy hats, carharts, and Levis.

Then the speakers started. After a brief introduction and a request to split the caucus into two groups to alleviate the cramped quarters and lack of seating, members of the public presented 2 minute speeches on the candidates. These were not slick campaign-trail sound-bites, but honest and heart-felt (if long-winded) plugs for the candidates that the individuals were supporting.

But then the sound that would characterize the rest of my evening rang through the room. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Boobie, Boobie, Boobie!” A couple of other moms (and dads) gave me sympathetic looks as I tried to quiet Lily down to no avail. Then a gentleman who I’d watched hug his neighbor so graciously just minutes before asked me to leave. The amazing thing is that, rather than bite his head off or tell him where to shove it, I got up and walked out, feeling utterly deflated.

When I got into the hallway, I realized that I was not the only one with a child who found the lengthy speeches of caucus night less than thrilling. I spent the next half an hour getting all the confirmation I needed that I was not alone in feeling that this format does not live up to the promise of representative government–that everyone can participate and cast their vote.

We’re lucky. We live minutes from our voting location. We work day jobs. We have two parents to wrangle two children. And still making it through the 2.5 hours from the time we walked in to the time we finally got to cast our votes (with the vast majority of our precinct, I’m happy to report) for Obama was exhausting. We finally ended up taking turns watching the kids out in the hall while the other listened and then whoever was on kid duty would pop in, raise the vote card in the air, get counted, and pop back out again.

The caucus format is absolutely not representative government. People who work nights, single parents, people who live far from their caucus locations, or even people with sick children or those who cannot afford babysitting (or whose babysitters were either voting or not available) were not able to participate tonight. Those of us who parent young children and who still managed to participate this evening were in the minority and I wonder how many stayed at home, or sent a single parent to vote.

There is no way that I’m aware of to vote by proxy in a caucus (I would have happily stayed home with the kids if Matt could have voted for both of us instead of just casting one single vote) and there’s no ballot by mail. This is in part because a caucus involves nominating and voting for delegates to participate in the county-wide conventions that are part of the run up to the National Conventions this summer, but it would be so simply to allow people to be nominated in advance and to provide a mail-in option. It would be even simpler to allow a proxy vote (although the chances of this allowing single moms or night-shift workers to vote seem dubious).

In the end, Obama won the day and I cast my first ever vote for a candidate who truly inspires me. But I can’t help feeling just a bit marginalized by the process, even though I got to participate. I can’t imagine how it would have felt to be a single mother and have to choose between wrangling both of my children through that chaos or passing up my opportunity to vote. You can bet the Colorado Democratic Party and anyone else I think might have a say in this process will be receiving a letter from ChezArtz urging them to be truly representative by allowing some sort of absentee option for those who cannot easily participate in caucus.

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