People from the US like to call ours the “World’s Greatest Democracy,” so when I heard that there was an opportunity to volunteer at the DFL caucus hosted by Blaine, I was excited to see that greatness first hand. But what I saw wasn’t all that great. The organizers had not garnered enough adult volunteers to sufficiently run all of the rooms, so instead of showing people around the school, I was stationed at room 117 with an extraordinarily nice party-worker and she went over the finer points of registration with me (which helped me more than I could have thought later on that night). Due to my location, I was able to see the line that the main table had to deal with. It stretched far outside the main entrance, and was louder than pretty much any line, outside of sporting events, that I had ever heard.

When the floodgates were opened, there were evidently some very impassioned voters among those in attendance. Many were decked out in Bernie and Hillary gear, most of whom stayed for their precincts’ caucuses. At about 6:30 p.m. the doors in the North Commons were opened, and that’s when the fun truly began. Being that I was out in the open, so to speak, people thought that mine was a main registration table, when in fact I was only working for one precinct. At one point, there was a line of nearly 40 people that were looking to register at my table, most were outside of their precinct or not even voting in their preferred caucus. Luckily, those 40 people were very flexible, especially when I had to inform them that their designated room was elsewhere in the building. More than once, I ran out of room on registration sheets which were either replaced quickly (at least before a huge wave of people came again) or had me and my partner improvising creatively with a notepad. Every single person that came to the table was registering in the precinct for the first time, or voting for the first time (of the two that were already registered, one was working with me). The downtime was absolutely unbearable though. I had no chair to sit on, and I felt my legs becoming stiff while I was doing nothing but waiting to again be bombarded with questions from those unaware of their precinct, of which there were more than the original 40. Come caucus time at 7:00 p.m. I was left to work the table by myself, as my partner was in room 117 convening. This was where I experienced the greatest lull in action, as news of a car accident on Main reached me. At about 7:30, there was chatter of extending the deadline for voting to accommodate what I heard to be a 3-5 mile long line of cars. And at 7:50, ten minutes before the original deadline for voting, I was informed that the deadline would be extended to 9:00 p.m. Upon this, I felt a mixture of sadness and hunger, as I had not eaten at all that day (except an apple right after school…yum). People then began to slowly trickle in again, thankfully a lot calmer than those who had come earlier. I helped a few older folks who were either very nice and sweet or very annoyed that they were being helped by a freshman after dealing with that traffic. The precinct that I was working didn’t see any new voters in the hour extension, but still had to stay open for anybody that may come in. Acting more like a talking map than a registration volunteer at this point, I became more and more aware of my weariness. Eventually, people stopped coming in, and the attitude among many of the workers was that of relief. My precinct counted votes, recorded them, and finally my work was done.

Looking back on it, I feel that the most important lesson I learned from this was that caucuses are terrible. Please bring back primaries, Minnesota. Please, for the sake of everybody, bring back primaries.