I don't belong to an organized political party;

I'm a Democrat. Will Rogers coined this line back in the early days of the last century and people keep repeating it. I think it's time to retire that joke and get organized. Today was the 43 congresstional district Democratic caucus to select delegates for the state caucus. Let me tell you about it.

The letter with the information about the caucus arrived last week. It contained the address of the meeting place and other various information. Nowhere did it suggest you bring id. Check-in time was to be 8:45am to 10am. If you weren't checked in by 10am, your seat could be given to an alternate. What I didn't realize then, was that they were planning to check in around 2000 people in 75 minutes. In order to do that, you need to check in 27 people/minute. You can do that if you're organized and have lots of well trained people doing the checking. They had 8. In order to make it work, they'd have to check in someone every 18 seconds. Um. Check-in involved showing id, signing your name, indicating a candidate preference, finding your badge, and gettting an agenda.

Unfortunately, for some reason (I'm suspecting incompetence, but I'm Not a Nice Person) there were no badges for a largish number of delegates. Despite the fact that we were, in fact, all on the printed list. Call me silly, but if you were supposed to be printing a known number of badges, wouldn't you check to make sure you had the right number after the print run? I mean, they've had this info since the precinct caucuses back in early February. Surely that's enough time to get 2000 badges printed and double checked.

This was all taking place in the gymnasium of a local highschool. With no windows and no airconditioning. Did you know we're having a heat wave here in Seattle? In the 20 or 30 minutes I stood in line to get my badge -- which turned out not to exist -- I could feel sweat pouring down my back. After I got all checked in -- and explaining to the not very nice woman at the desk that volunteerism is no excuse for incompetence -- I went outside to cool down and promptly lost the pseudo-badge they'd given me. Since this consisted of a sticky note stuck to my clothing that's not too surprising. No, they didn't have spare, blank badges for emergencies. Nor did they have a problem desk to send problems to. You had to wait for one of the roving credentials committee people to come to that check-in desk and solve the problem, making the line situation worse.

They did have nice big signs hung well above the tables telling you which line to get into based on your last name. Unfortunately, the printing on them was so small and light it couldn't be read more than 10 feet away. Not even by the young folks.

All the check-in was in one room after which you were supposed to take your seats in another. No signs about this of course, so more time lost trying to figure out what to do and/or explaining same. What they did with the poor alternates was godawful. I'm not even going into that.

So while the credentials committee was trying to count up check-ins and figure out which precincts needed alternates etc. etc. etc., they had minor party luminariies doing the pep-talk speech thing in the other room. Where people were packed in like sardines. I sat just outside the room in a door where there was a breeze and I still had sweat pouring off my body like water as if I just got out of the pool. I'm getting hotter and hotter and starting to feel sickish.

I finally got up and went into the room where the credentials committee were running around like chickens without heads and told someone I was on the verge of throwing up/passing out and I just couldn't do this. Here's my credential, appoint an alternate. And I called Jordin to come get me. I was nauseated, dehydrated, and had a pounding headache.

It was a nightmare of confusion, disorganization, and incompetence. One guy I was standing near said it was silly. It was worse than that. I couldn't exercise my vote because the physical circumstances were making me ill. (I didn't see any provision for handicapped access either -- flight of concrete stairs to get to the gym.) And the nonsense that was being perpetrated on us all, the confusion, disorganization, and incompetence, really discourage further participation.

I mean, look, they've done this before. They knew how many people they had coming, unlike the precinct caucuses, but they were completely unprepared. So far as I could tell, no on had done the elementary math on how many people there were to check-in in the allotted time and what that would mean for staffing. They didn't even count the badges to make sure they had the correct number. There was no procedure for dealing with foul-ups. Inadequate signage. Not enough people although Democratic headquarters is swamped with people trying to volunteer.

You know what I think? I think all the sf fans in Washington should get together and take over the Democratic party. We sure could have done a better job than the idiocy I saw displayed today.

Comments

[Ulrika]

My experience wasn't as bad as yours, largely, I think, because the combined 8th & 1st CD segments that made up my caucus didn't add up to more than about 600 people, instead of in the thousands. As it was, we did manage to stick it out long enough to get through the selection of delegates vote (helped by the fact that we were in a Dean subcaucus, which was smaller)but by then it was 3:30, we'd been there since 9:30 and hadn't had the wit to pack lunches, water bottles, and reading material, and so we decided to bail on having a vote in selecting the alternates. It is just ridiculous that what took all that time was just figuring out and vetting who had showed up and replacing whatever delgates who hadn't showed with alternates, but that was the substantive bulk of the day.

[Jerry]

If all the politically active sf fans in the Seattle area would just move into one district, we could do it.

[Mary Kay]

Well, according to the letter we got with caucus info, they expected it to be over by 1pm. However when I left at 11:15am the credentials committee had not yet certified anything and no voting had begun to take place. The 43rd district is very heavily populated and very heavily Democratic so they send the biggest delegation to the state convention thus the large numbers. You'd think though that after having done this a few times, they'd have a couple of clues at least.

MKK