With 68 percent of precincts reporting, Barack Obama appears to have won Hawaii by a landslide. Obama had 20,974 votes, or 76 percent, to Sen. Hillary Clinton's 6,529 votes, or 24 percent, as of 11:39 p.m.

The turn-out was incredible -- far more than maybe anyone had expected.

"I don't think we could have prepared for this," one of the caucus organizers at Jefferson Elementary told me mid-way through the evening.

I'm sure there will be much debate in the days to come about the process. With the overwhelming number of people, many sites ran out of materials or even took good faith pledges from people that they would register as Democrats afterwards if they were allowed to cast ballots tonight.

The site I was at ran out of both printed ballots (they had to handwrite them) and name cards (which they used to write down the precinct in which each person was voting). One person compared it to "choosing your high school prom king and queen." That was less than an hour into the voting.

As soon as I finished talking with people in line at Jefferson Elementary, I grabbed a seat at a table where ballots for one of the smaller precincts were being collected and watched the action from there.

It was chaos. The only organized elements appeared to be the tables, arranged by precinct, and the line. There were hundreds of people crammed in the cafeteria and thousands outside. People stood on tables. Every 10 minutes, someone would go to the microphone and assure people that Everything was fine, No, the rules had not been changed, we've just run out of ballots.

Some people who arrived around 7 p.m. saw the line, which was at that point wrapped around several school buildings, and turned away. Others probably just couldn't find parking in cramped Waikiki and gave up. I parked at the Waikiki Shell and walk over to the school.

But the mood among those who stuck around were surprisingly upbeat. Les Among, a member of the Waikiki Neighborhood Board, likened it to "neighbors who haven't seen each other in a while."

It was this great, big crazy mass of people who knew they were taking part in something big, even though they may not have known exactly what to do, how the caucus worked or even if they were registered Democrats.

It will be interesting to see if this momentum holds up till the general election.

Just walking onto the site and catching sight of that never-ending line was a personal thrill. I realized tonight that I've never actually gone to a polling place to vote in an election, since I left Hawaii at 18 for school and so have since been an absentee voter by default. Checking the little box and sending the ballot in the mail is definitely not the same thing. Here were people who had taken the time to come to the site, and waited in line for probably over an hour just to make a little mark on a piece of paper that was then shoved unceremoniously into a manila envelope.

They say democracy is messy, and tonight most certainly proved it.