It's like a Caucus-fest in here.

So I went out and caucused today.

That seems like it should have been easy to do, right? Just march up to your precinct place and take part, right? Wrong. What if you don't know where to go?

For the Democratic Caucuses, they just say to go to the Caucus Finder and it'll tell you. Sure, that'll work, if and only if you are registered to vote at your current address. You can register to vote if at the caucus though, and there isn't a way to find out where to go unless you already know your precinct. How many people who decide to caucus last minute do you think actually know what precinct they're in?

I didn't.

You can find maps on the King County website, but they're not super easy to find and they're stupid to read. Why can't you just put in your address and have them goddam tell you where to go? (it's worth pointing out that the king county GOP website points to the KC Metro polling place lookup to find your precinct, which also only works if you're already registered to vote at your current address

While poking around the internet to figure this information out (I last voted in 2004 and hadn't updated my registration to my current address, so had no idea where I was going and Mike's last registered address was when we lived across the street) I did find a couple cool things that someone really concerned about their privacy might freak out about.

• Sound Politics Washington State Voter Database — You can input a name or address and it'll give you the name, address, birthdate, date the person registered, and the date the person last voted. You can also see who owns the property and the sales history of that property. If you don't put in a full address (i.e. you search by name), it'll leave off the last digit of the street address, but its not like that's private, when you can also go to the:

• Do Caucus website— If you search by name, it'll give you a list of all the people with similar names, the number of their street address (but not the street itself), age, and sex. From there, you can click through to the precinct and caucus information you need. You can also search by address to get a list of people whose Street number and zip code are the same as your own and where they would go.

Neat, huh?

Anyway, so what I did is a lookup by street in the voter database and did a name search for the other people in the apartments in either side of us and went to that precinct. Shoulda been easier.

After poking around a bit more, because I was grossly unsatisfied with the user experience, I did manage to find a little google mashup on the 41st district democats website, which is cool, because it gives you the outline for your precinct and also the general caucus area.

Neat right?

Why did that take so long to find and why isn't a larger organization doing something like that on a big scale to make it easy for those who want to take part in the political process?

At any rate, I did make it to the caucus, and it was interesting, but disorganized. The woman in charge of our precinct (Precinct Officer?) apparently hadn't taken the time beforehand to read the instructions and kept doing things out of order. For example, she wanted to read to us how we were to choose the delegates and get into detail about the alternates and votes and blah blah blah before we'd even had a chance to make changes to our selection and make a final tally.

I mean, come on.

Anyway, we did our thing, got our delegates (looks like Mike's going to the legislative caucus in April!), and did some of that resolution making.

It's absolutely telling that the only resolution anyone in our precinct wanted to put in was from the one guy who wanted to terminate the caucus process and go to apportioning delegates via a primary election instead.

There's a pretty good article about the history of the primary vs. caucus systtem in Washington State in The Seattle Times, but the gist is this: Primary ballots go out for the Democratic and Republican candidates. The parties also both caucus. The Democrats don't count the primary election for anything, and apportion delegates solely by the caucuses. The Republicans will do 19 delegates from the primary results and 18 from the caucuses — this time.

It's worth noting that the primary elections in Washington state only came about because the republicans didn't like the outcome of their 1988 caucuses where Pat Robertson dominated. Since then, they've allocated all (1992), 1/2 (1996), 1/3 (2000), or 1/2 (this year)of their delegates according to the primary.

Washington state taxpayers will pay $10 million this year to decide on just 1/2 of the delegates for a single political party.

Awesome, right?

Washington did not have a primary election at all in 2004.