the 1849 makes room for late arrivals to sit on the floor. a few more photos from seattle central [#]

There was already a healthy crowd when I arrived about twenty minutes early at Seattle Central Community College for the massive conglomeration of Capitol Hill precinct caucuses. Still, sign-in lines were relatively short once people without voter registration cards in hand deciphered maps to determine their precinct. What was most striking was that most of the people organizing the event, directing people, and running the voting tallies were wearing Clinton buttons and had scattered Hillary signs around the premises. In contrast, an overwhelming majority of the people streaming through the doors and seeming a little more confused by the process were there to support Barack Obama.

My precinct, the mighty 1848 which is comprised of just a couple of blocks, shared a room with about ten others precinct gatherings in a large ground floor lecture hall. As the clock inched closer to 1 pm, initial circles of twenty-five kept getting expanded to allow more people to fit. Soon, the center of each circle was filled with more and more people and the perimeters grew crowded. The under-ventillated room grew warmer and warmer as we waited for the late-arriving masses to register and squeeze into the obviously undersized room. A half an hour later, someone with a megaphone encouraged us to begin our discussions while officials got everyone signed in. We each took turns going around our multi-ringed circle stating our candidate preferences and our reasoning behind our choices. After a while, we relocated to the hallway to have more room and less crowd noise and the discussion continued for about another hour with younger voters going almost entirely to Obama. Once everyone had their chance to speak, the precinct committee officers tallied the “votes” cast at sign-in and calculated the initial delegate tallies. I didn’t get the exact counts, but with about a hundred people in attendance, about 65 were for Obama, about 20 were for Clinton, and about 15 entered undecided.

This was followed by a round of generally polite and occasionally heated — Obama supporters were a bit more fiery than the Clinton side — back-and-forth discussion to win the allegiance of the undecideds. The major issues in our precinct were the health care plans, the question of experience, electability, and Obama’s ability to transform American politics and our country’s image in the world. Most expressed admiration for both candidates and agreed that we were fortunate in the quality of our options. When all was said and done at about 3 pm, we ended up sending 5 Obama delegates and 2 Clinton delegates to the Legislative District caucuses on 5 April. I’ll be one of the Clinton delegates, mostly out of curiosity of seeing first-hand the nominating process in action.