Yesterday I did the Texas Two Step with a few hundred thousand other Texans. No I haven’t lost my mind and become all country, I’m talking about our state-governed right to vote twice! Yesterday Tony and I cast our votes in the primary election and then I returned at night to caucus. I have wanted to caucus every since my dear friend Amy shared her Iowa Caucus experience. I was super-excited to learn about this Texas Two-Step business. Even though Tony flew out to Redmond last night I couldn’t resist my constitutional obligation to cast my vote for the remaining 1/3 delegates the caucus in Texas represents.

If you watched any of the CNN poll results you might have heard a little about how freakin’ insane the caucus was. I can tell you about my experience. I had asked several different groups how the caucus would work so I could judge whether or not I wanted to risk taking my kids. How I was *told* it would work is this:

Show up, stand in line, sign in and leave.  I was told many people would be bringing kids and there would be cookies. Sweet. I love cookies.

So I show up and it is mass chaos, there is no line at all, just people huddling around. It was clear that these are the Die-Hards. They all know each other from political circles, they have all been activists together in some capacity. And then there was Addison and I At least I had the foresight to a) put her in a pull-up and b) bring my sling.

So after waiting awhile we were all ushered into a cafeteria and told to sit at the tables. Except they ran out of tables. I was lucky enough to find a table, thankfully. Then they explained that everyone would have to show their voter reg. card where we had stamped that we had voted earlier (no earlier vote = no caucus vote). Except…oops…they had underplanned for sign-in sheets by 100% So they literally sent some guy to go to his local house and print off several more. And we all waited.

Then they made some announcement how things would progress: first they would do early voters and those with voter reg cards, last they would do those who had no proof of vote (that they would have to look up manually for confirmation).  They would do it by table. I quickly calculated that we would end up waiting many MANY hours for them to get to our table. I started to panic.

But then a line started to form and a few people from my table whispered that this was the “voter reg card” line so I hoped in line and got in at the front before the rest of the room figured out what the new trend was. Did I mention it was total chaos?

Then after THAT line did not move for what felt like hours (but was probably only 15-20 minutes), they made an announcement that we should alphabetize ourselves and they would do it alphabetically which would make it easier to verify information. Except - haha - the people who voted that day (as opposed to early voters) were not alphabetized on the list but were listed according to vote time. But you have not seen chaos until you see 150 total strangers trying to alphabetize themselves in an overcrowded cafeteria.

Halfway into that mania, ANOTHER announcement was made to divide ourselves into early voters and same-day voters and THEN alphabetize ourselves and that people with children would have first priority. At this point I offered my child up for $10 per person

But as it turns out they decided NOT to give people with children priority or at least if they did, it sort of looked like early boarding at the airport where they won’t really say anything unless you come up and start bullying them into letting you on. No one with kids was called forward. I would have thrown a huge fit since I had three kids sitting home alone after dark AND bedtime at this point, but my last name is a ‘B’ and so I had it in good. I wonder how people handled it who had shown up early only to end up at the end of the line with their “z” name?!

So finally when I got my turn to sign, I filled in my info which took all of 20 seconds (why do people take 15 minutes to do this?! It isn’t that hard - name, email address, home address, phone, voter ID, chosen candidate and a few random check boxes for voter stats (gender, ethnicity, age, etc). I swear it is like people were taking the SATs the way they so carefully studied their one line for errors. Sheesh! So I was in and out in like 20 seconds after I finally got to sign.

In the end I was gone for 1.5 hours but I’m guessing the actual caucus (the part you stay for if you are nuts and have no small children, after the signing in) went on for many many hours before they were done.

Whew! So I did it and it looks like those who showed up for the caucus really made a big difference. It is interesting to me to see how different the caucus results are from the primary results. I’m glad I had my chance to vote twice.

And I am particularly feeling good about my constitutional obligation to vote since this week I have to exempt myself from Jury Duty. This is the second time in my life I have ever been called for Jury Duty. The first time was the week Noah was due and I exempted out of that one. But this time I was badly pathetically obsessively looking forward to it. I had dreams about what kind of case I might land, I had fantasies about spending days - maybe months - hanging out reading a book in silence with other adults! Maybe some people hate the idea of jury duty but to me it spells “Free Vacation with a Law Enforcement Twist” hahah. So it literally broke my pathetic heart to have to exempt myself out AGAIN. But Tony is already taking off most of this week for his Redmond trip and he just can’t take off more work so I can attend jury duty. Why do men get to have all the fun?!?!

Will they ever call me again for Jury Duty? Sob. A girl can wish.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Other Stuff, Venting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.