This weekend, our family may have discovered inadvertently and first-hand another reason why caucuses are a bad idea in the 21st century.
If you're just flipping through, here is the bottom line: since the Washington caucuses took place on Saturday at 1 PM and the official time window for signing up was only a half-hour , we had to drag our 3 kids with us to the caucus location - a nearby elementary school. The older ones played outside, but the two-year-old stuck with us.
By the time we managed to get out of there, he had spent over half an hour in a hall crowded with hundreds of people. Not only did our toddler miss his nap, but that night he came down with a cold or (I still hope not) flu.
I hope this helps serve as warning to people going to primaries and caucuses in the remaining states, and as another incentive to eliminate this outdated mode of voting.
More details about flu season and the particular caucus we attended, below the flap.
...so, if you flipped over, here's first of all a reminder that Flu High Season is Right Now.
Mandating a huge series of events across the nation exactly during this season, in which hundreds and hundreds of strangers breathe into each other inside confined spaces for an hour or two - is perhaps not the best of ideas.
We caucused in Laurelhurst Elementary in north-east Seattle. There were 12 precincts there. The area has a spate of student and low-income housing against a much larger background of very-much-upscale single-family neighborhoods. I was expecting Washington and especially Seattle to be Obama country - but if there was anywhere in Seattle where this would not be the case, Laurelhurst was probably that place. So there was some suspense in the air. In addition, my wife who naturalized as a US citizen in 2006 was about to vote in the Presidential race for the first time. So we were excited, like most people I guess.
When we got there a few minutes after 1, a line was snaking outside - it turned out the line was just to get into the school! Inside the usual and widely-reported mayhem raged, but organizers got to their senses relatively quickly and gave up on the idea of signing everyone up at the same table. Instead, we waited with our precinct people until sign-up sheets arrived to us.
According to the initial tallies our precinct had 43 Obama, 11 Clinton and 14 undecided - if Clinton lost a single voter, she would have been wiped out of the precinct for failing to clear 15%! Later it turned out that the tallier made an error (yet another reason against caucuses, there are so many chances to make a mistake), and there were really only 4 undecided. The final tally was 47-10-3 - Obama missing a sweep of all 5 allocated delegates by virtue of two Hillary votes. Around us the picture was similar, with Obama taking precincts 3-2 or 4-1.
By the way, in 2004 this precinct only had 20-30 voters - I don't remember exactly, but I do remember that I was the last vote completing a delegate for Kucinich, and he had 4 or 5 voters so there couldn't have been more then 30 total. And in 2004 everyone said it was a record turnout - well, Saturday the record was doubled.
Meanwhile I started looking for our friend Avner who votes in a different precinct that was supposed to be at the same school. I didn't find him - he called about half an hour later, asking us to replace him at home so he could vote. He was at home where his own toddler was napping, and didn't want to wake her up. His wife was at work, and was anyways undecided so decided to skip voting (my wife also works most Saturdays, it was mere coincidence that she had this one off; did anyone say "yet another reason against caucuses"??).
But our friend called us too late; by that time tallies had closed and there was no time to replace him. Besides, given the granular nature of delegate-allocation, his particular vote wouldn't have made a difference now anyway (his precinct was 33-19 Obama, translating to a solid 3-2).
Back to our own toddler: by the time I ascertained that all that was needed for us was to sign up and we could get the hell out of there, we'd already been there for half an hour. But by then we've somewhat lost our focus due to the excitement and confusion, and forgot the basic public-health precautions which veteran parents like us should not forget. Ultimately I did take him out to the playground, but by then he was so excited (he is a hyper-sociable, excitable little fellow) that he lost his napability (parents should know what I'm talking about).
By the way, he was far from being the only little kid running around in the hall that afternoon.
We laid him to bed early that night, but an hour later he was up again, with unmistakable signs of cold or flu. He might have caught it earlier at daycare, or directly from us - but that afternoon caucus hour on Saturday certainly didn't help him keep his defenses up.
So today I'm home with him, trying to do some work and putting this diary out.
If you have a primary or caucus ahead of you in the coming weeks, please try to minimize your kids' exposure to big crowds.
And please, if you have a caucus do lobby your state party to give it up.
UPDATE: Added Poll