If you want your voice to be heard in this year's election, tonight is your best -- and possibly only -- opportunity. In neighborhoods throughout the state, Republicans and Democrats will conduct caucus meetings to elect delegates to state and county party conventions. It may not seem like a big deal to the average person, but this is where the political stakes are the highest in Utah. An individual voter wields the most power at a caucus meeting compared to an election.
The convention delegates do more than just set the party's platform, although that is an important duty. They also vote on the candidates who are vying for their party's nomination. The candidates will only go to a primary if one of them cannot get 60 percent of the delegate vote in the caucuses.
In a race where a political party doesn't field any candidate, the caucus voting may be the only time there is a real choice of candidates for voters. Hence, it is important for people to attend their caucus meetings to build support for the candidate of their choice.
Unfortunately, the caucus system is easy to manipulate. A special interest group can easily take advantage of voter apathy and stack the meetings to elect delegates favorable to its position. The votes these delegates cast may not represent the true mainstream and could remove candidates from consideration who may have had a broader appeal with voters or who were less beholden to a particular faction within the party.
Moderate Republicans, for example, have complained that the ultraconservative fringe of the party has stacked the deck in caucuses for years, hijacking the GOP and alienating mainstream party members by pushing extremist positions, such as opposing water fluoridation, calling for the United States to leave the United Nations and "excommunicating" any Republican who gives an endorsement to any non-Republican candidate.
The ideal way to fight this is to scrap the caucus system and go straight to primary elections. That rankles party strategists who would rather avoid the cost, both financial and political, of a heated, fratricidal primary campaign. But it would give mainstream voters a real chance to pick the candidates that best represent them.
This is an issue the Legislature needs to take up at its next session. Meanwhile, the best solution is for more people to make an effort to attend the caucus meetings and question those who are running as delegates.
Not only do you need to know where potential delegates stand on the issues and which candidates they support at all levels, you also need to know (in the case of the Republican convention) who is the second choice for each position. The GOP uses an instant runoff system. If no candidate gets 60 percent of the first ballot, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and the second-choice votes are tallied up. The process is repeated until either one candidate garners 60 percent or the field is whittled down to two people who will then face a primary election vote.
Theoretically, a candidate may not be in first place initially but could come out on top if he or she is second choice for enough people.
The system has merit in that some delegates may leave after casting their ballots, reducing the pool of delegates to the point where the candidate with the most persistent delegates wins. With an instant runoff, everyone votes only one time and the winning candidate truly represents the will of the convention. That's a weak argument for maintaining a caucus system that is fundamentally flawed, but it's what we've got right now.
Caucuses will be convened tonight. For the system to work, informed people need to attend their caucus meetings and vote for delegates. Be there.
Election Day '09 was a roller-coaster for election reformers. Instant runoff voting had a great night in Minnesota, where St. Paul voters chose to implement IRV for its city elections, and Minneapolis voters used IRV for the first time—with local media touting it as a big success. As the Star-Tribune noted in endorsing IRV for St. Paul, Tuesday’s elections give the Twin Cities a chance to show the whole state of Minnesota the benefits of adopting IRV. There were disappointments in Lowell and Pierce County too, but high-profile multi-candidate races in New Jersey and New York keep policymakers focused on ways to reform elections; the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald were among many newspapers publishing commentary from FairVote board member and former presidential candidate John Anderson on how IRV can mitigate the problems of plurality elections.