LIVE Inside the Washington Caucuses: Reporting in from the south end of Redmond

First, the bottom line: My precinct went 64% for Obama (and 36% for Clinton)) giving Clinton 2 delegates and Obama 3.

Now, the rest of the story. As is surely no surprise by now, the place was jam-packed. Yes, you guessed it: standing room only. Our caucus location served twenty different precincts, which was clearly too many for the size of the venue. Dwight Pelz, are you listening? Let's do better next time.

In Dwight's defense, of course, the room was probably booked well in advance of the Iowa/New Hampshire primary action, when we didn't know nationwide Democratic turnout was going to be so huge.

Things would still have been crowded in twice the space we had, though. Signing folks in took close to two hours, and was thorough chaos.

Other than that, things went as expected, so I won't comment on them except to call out two things that deserve mention.

First, the sign-in process was total chaos. I don't say that happily, as I was helping sign people in. But it was, in no small part because the King County Democratic party is seriously short on precinct committee officers (PCOs). I just took a quick count on the latest published list of PCOs, and only 46.7% of King County's precincts have a Democratic PCO.

For events like today's caucus, that means that the few PCOs who were there ended up handling the sign-in sheets for several precincts.

I had six separate precincts whose paperwork I was trying to deal with. That would have been fine under normal turnout conditions, but the blizzard of people quickly made a mockery of the concept of orderly lines and manageable meetings.

Consequently, sign-in took much longer than it needed to, and a lot of people forgot or didn't see that they were supposed to write down their preference on the sign-in sheet. That wouldn't have happened if there was a PCO there to give each person one-on-one attention while they were signing in.

So for anyone reading this post who lives in King County, please take a few minutes to see if your precinct has a designated PCO, and if not, sign up for the job. It's really not that much work.

Clearly, from the number of questions I fielded about whether the February 19th primary counts for anything, Washingtonians haven't gotten used to the fact that we don't have general election style primaries anymore.

And for Democratic voters, particularly, they may not be used to caucusing yet. I heard and saw several things today which makes me think that perhaps the Republican party is doing a better job allocating delegates. They're using both the primary and the caucus to allocate delegates.

Yes, there are advantages to the caucus, but let's not forget the limitations.

For example, knowing that the venue was going to be packed, and unable to score a babysitter in time, my wife ended up staying home with the kids rather than try to shepherd a toddler and a three year old in a situation where I wasn't going to be able to help at all. That is a disappointment for her, because it means she's disenfranchised. She has no other opportunity to have her primary preference counted for anything.

Another example: An elderly lady fought through the crowd to my sign-in table and told me that she had her 90 year old, wheelchair-bound mother with her, who was waiting elsewhere on the side of the room (I don't blame her.

There's no way she'd have been able to push a wheelchair through the mob to get her mother up to the sign-in table. I sent her back with a sheet for her mother to fill out, which she did and returned back to me.

So that story ends well, but clearly the effort of going to the caucus was enormous for that woman and her mother. I definitely support, at least in the abstract philosophical sense, what Dwight Pelz said on KUOW the other day: that it's probably a good thing for folks to get out and talk politics with their neighbors at least once every four years. But for some folks, that really is difficult.

This evening I was talking to a friend who lives in Magnolia, who for ordinary reasons of a hectic life, couldn't get to her caucus location on time.

She got there, and signed in, but it was after her precinct had already counted its votes. Disenfranchised.

She told me a third-hand story of an elderly neighbor who can't drive anymore, and had a similar experience because her taxi was late picking her up. She did everything right, but she still got there too late to have her vote counted.

Don't get me wrong. I like the caucus. But it just isn't practical for everyone, and the state Democratic party needs to find some solution for those people to have their voices heard too. I don't know if a half-and-half system is best or if we just need a better absentee process for the caucuses, but we need something.

The process I saw and participated in today simply doesn't work for everyone.