Valentine’s Day is a time when we ponder compatibility. There are two other rituals that are completely incompatible in the 21st century: caucusing and electing the next leader of the free world.

It seems that efficiency would make too much sense, and the geniuses that lead our state’s Democratic Party want to make selecting the next president as obnoxious as possible.

There’s a state law that “we the people” passed via a citizens’ initiative in 1988 that mandates that we hold a presidential primary. The Democratic Party still wants to caucus, which disenfranchises 95 percent of Democratic voters in the state.

I went to my caucus and debated with 26 other Democrats in my district, but that was just a sliver of the voters who vote at my precinct. In fact, I went to lunch prior to my caucus and I saw families eating, servers and cooks working, and drivers out and about doing errands. Caucuses are completely inconvenient for voters.

Caucuses are also antiquated; they need to expire so that political science professors in 2050 will teach students how elections were “back in the day.”

Remember how low voter turnout is in the U.S.? Having an entire 14-hour day, where you have the opportunity to vote for a candidate or ballot measures is not convenient enough. Even here in Washington, where your ballot is mailed to you and you have three weeks to fill it out before turning it in, is inconvenient for people.

Why does the Democratic Party think creating an opportunity for only one hour on a random Saturday afternoon will attract participants?

At the University of Washington, we have Democrats who are studying abroad this quarter who could not participate. We have friends who are attending out-of-state colleges who could not participate.

The primary is a streamlined option for electing the party’s nominee. Our state’s primary will happen regardless of what both parties do, so the Democratic Party might as well conform to the will of the people and abolish the caucuses and adhere to the primary only.

Plus it’s cheaper to allocate the delegates based on the primary election. To hold a caucus, the party has to rent gyms, community centers and other spaces. That money could be saved for the general election this fall, when the candidates will need money to combat the Republicans.

I went to Hillary Clinton’s rally in Seattle with 5,000 excited voters, and I went to the Barack Obama rally with 23,000 voters. The momentum generated by the candidates was completely killed by the party caucus.

People argue that the caucus is an opportunity to discuss, defend and support candidates. You get the opportunity to persuade voters to change their minds.

For me, it was a big waste of time.

In the first round, it was 14 for Obama, 16 for Clinton and one uncommitted. We had our discussion. We went through the second round of voting, and no one changed their minds, including the sole uncommitted person. What’s the point?

And then you have the superdelegates, another institution of the Democratic Party that frustrates and confuses voters. The superdelegates make the selection of our president anti-democratic (with a small “d”).

The whole primary season is far from perfect. But Washington state should be the first state to hold their primary, not the corn-fed folk from banjo-strumming Iowa. We have the most brilliant minds here. We’ve invented modern airplanes that fly around the world. We’ve revolutionized the technology industry. We’ve globalized coffee culture.

We should be the ones setting the pace for the rest of the nation in selecting the next president, and we should do it with a simple primary election.

[Reach columnist Ryan Morden at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]