The description of the Caucus badge says: "Visit an election during any phase of an active election and have enough reputation to cast a vote. This badge can be awarded multiple times."
At the same time, if we look at the dates when some badges were awarded, it was long after an election. I will use examples from Mathematics, where I noticed this. For example, you can check this user. The list says that they were awarded this badge in June for election no. 7 and election no. 8. You might be able to find some other examples with this SEDE query. (To make them easy to access, I will list also other examples from the linked query that I got for the date range from the beginning of this year until November: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Questions.
- What exactly are the conditions when this happens? Is it enough that somebody visits an old election page and, at the same time, the user does not have a badge for that election?
- Is the fact, that one can get Caucus badge after an election by design? If that's the case, shouldn't the phrase "active election" be removed from the description?
I have noticed this past question: Got Caucus badge for inactive election. I think that is a bit different from my question - since that one asks about a nonstarted election.
EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, there is an older question asking about this: Strange behavior of [caucus] badge. So if the above cases can be explained by merging of user accounts (as suggested in the answer to that question and also in the first comment posted here), then I guess this is status-bydesign and this question can be considered a duplicate.
I'd say that even if it is a duplicate, it might be worth keeping around — since if somebody notices the same thing and they search for the question, probably from the title of this one they'll immediately see that it is what they want — and if they have the older question among the search results, they have to read a bit more than the title to see what goes on there. In any case, I'll leave the decision, whether this question should be closed as duplicate and — if it is closed — whether it should remain here or be deleted, to other users. I certainly admit, that I should have done better job in looking for older questions with similar topics — and I should have noticed that one.
