Stop the Caucus, I Want To Get Off!

I can still remember the day I voted for the first time. I had almost spent my entire seventeenth year being drilled by my mother about how voting was my civic responsibility; how our founding fathers, suffragettes, and succeeding generations of brave and patriotic souls had sacrificed so much to guarantee me that right; how the identity of the candidate for whom I voted was private, and that I never had to share that information with anyone. It was such a thrilling leadup to that moment when I stepped up and used the stylus to punch through that first ballot card. My mother and I went out to lunch together afterwards to celebrate; it was a wonderful, memorable day.

Many years and many elections have passed since that day, and I have voted in each and every one. Would I say I'm a political activist? No; I don't post signs in my yard, I don't put stickers on my car, I don't campaign for anyone, and I don't make financial contributions to any parties or candidates. My sole political activism comes, and always has come, from exercising that precious right to have my vote be counted. It was a right I took for granted right until the day I moved this past spring from Illinois, a state which uses the primary system to choose candidates for presidential elections, to a new state, Minnesota, which uses the caucus system.

Until I moved, I had no real concept of what a caucus was. All I really knew was that those crazy people in Iowa had them all the time, and that it was a big deal because, so everyone said, they were often pretty good predictors of who the final candidates would turn out to be in the general election. Some part of me just assumed, when I moved, that a caucus would be conducted in essentially the same fashion as the primaries had been back in Illinois: you study the issues and the candidates' positions; you register to vote; you get a card telling you where to go; you show up, mark your ballot, and get a little sticker that says "I Voted Today", hooray for me! How wrong I was.

As I began to read more articles about the upcoming caucuses in the local papers, I grew more and more concerned that perhaps I was ill-informed about the caucus process, so I visited my party's website. It mentioned a lot about selecting delegates and discussing possible additions to the existing party platforms, but didn't really answer my key question, which was "How do I vote in a caucus?"

Seeking further clarification, I called our local party headquarters, reasoning that I could get clearer answers from a live human being. I did, but they were answers I found to be extremely disappointing. My first disappointment was that a caucus isn't like a primary election at all. It's more like a town hall meeting, where caucus goers show up and spend two hours doing just what the website said they do: they talk about selecting delegates to the next level of caucus and discuss any desired additions to the existing party platforms.

"Okay," I said to the representative on the other end of the line, "So when do we vote?"

"Well, you don't really vote in a caucus. After all the other items on the agenda have been covered, people might want to discuss or debate a little bit, and then there's a straw poll to divide the caucus up into groups by their favored candidate. You know, there'd be a McCain group, a Huckabee group, a Romney group..." Divide into groups? How is that a secret ballot?

The representative might have gone on a lot longer than that if I'd let him, but I was still stuck way back on his first statement: "You don't really vote in a caucus." I was so stuck on that, that in fact, I asked him to repeat it twice, to make sure I'd heard him correctly.

"So let me get this straight: I show up to a meeting, talk about the issues, about which I'm already comfortable I've made up my mind, select the delegates, and then there's a straw poll, and this whole process is going to take two and a half hours." Having spent most of my adult life in the Chicago area, time factors are always a concern for me.

"Well, if you show up, say, around seven-thirty or eight o'clock, that's probably pretty close to when the straw poll would happen, so if you time it just right, yeah, you could be out of there more quickly."

"Okay, so I show up right on time, cast my straw poll vote, and then I leave, and my vote gets counted."

"Not exactly."

What the 'not exactly' means, I discovered after further probing, was that even if I did manage to split the seconds properly and get there just in time to place a vote for the candidate of my choice, that didn't necessarily mean that the delegates selected by the group earlier in the meeting have to go to the convention and vote for that particular candidate (an excellent incentive to take part in the delegate-selection process, I guess). The fog was starting to lift, and I was not enjoying the view.

"So let me get this straight: I could show up, cast my straw poll vote, leave, then the delegate goes to the convention and decides he or she doesn't want to vote for my candidate, so my vote means nothing?"

"Not exactly." What that 'not exactly' means is that Minnesota's Super Tuesday caucus is only the beginning for Minnesota voters, and ultimately, it may have little to do with the party's final choice for candidate (remember, Minnesota went for Romney). Once the precinct caucuses have been held, then there are county or district-level conventions, which the chosen precinct delegates attend. After that, there is the congressional district convention. Then, according to The Minnesota Monitor, "In Minnesota, each of the state's eight congressional districts select three delegates for the convention. These are pledged delegates and will have a presidential preference attached to their voting at the national convention. Each congressional district chooses how that presidential preference will be allocated. At the state convention, another fourteen at-large delegates are chosen who may or may not be bound by presidential preference. That decision is made by a vote of the convention attendees."

"So really," I asked my, by now, exasperated representative, "my vote at the caucus Super Tuesday does not really count for anything except choosing a delegate, who may or may not wind up actually selecting the candidate for whom I have indicated a preference?"

"Yeah, I guess if you look at it like that, but you do still get to state a preference."

"But I don't want to state a preference! I want to vote! When do I get to vote?"

Clearly, the representative did not understand my concerns, any more than I understood how a caucus was a better system than the primary one I had been taking for granted. It's true that, initially, at least, the caucus was the system of choice used by our country to select candidates for presidential office, but in the early 1830s, the country began to come to its senses and realized that allowing a select number of meeting attendees to decide who the candidate would be, rather than allowing people to vote for themselves, gave those attendees too much power, and could actually be seen as an "undemocratic" way of doing things. Today, of the fifty states, just fourteen currently use the caucus system; the rest have decided to let all the voters have a say, not just those voters who choose to or are able to attend a meeting; in this fashion, primary states avoid widespread disenfranchisement of the voting population.

On Super Tuesday in Minnesota this year, the true effect of the caucus system as it currently operates was not "democracy in action," which many supporters of the caucus system spout off as the true "beauty" of the system; rather, the real effect of this arcane and convoluted system was the true disenfranchisement of thousands of people statewide.

Normally, caucuses only take place for just two and a half hours on one single night. In Illinois, and other states where primary systems are in place, the polls are open all day, to allow people the opportunity to vote. The Minnesota caucus system penalizes those who work night shifts, those who are unable to attend meetings due to illness or disability, college students in classes-it even penalizes those who are out of the state on caucus night, as the system makes no allowance for absentee ballots. None.

Normally, just due to those factors alone, there would be a large number of voters in the state who simply cannot participate because of the logistical barriers imposed by this archaic system. But this year, the already-restrictive structure of the caucus system imploded under the weight of an issue one would have thought to be every "Rock the Vote" advocate's dream: crushing and demanding voter turnout for both parties.

If Minnesota had a primary system, this would not have been a problem that caused thousands of people to be disenfranchised. But because of the limited hours of the caucus, the lengthy discussions taking place, the general sense of confusion about the process itself, and the inability of volunteers to address the needs of such a large turnout, there were problems galore.

The morning after the caucus, there were vociferous complaints about traffic jams, parking problems, location confusion, and long lines, and those were just the beginning. Some precincts actually ran out of ballots and wound up indicating their preferences (note how I do not say 'votes') on Post It notes or cut-up slips of paper. Other precincts were so overwhelmed that they closed their doors a full hour ahead of time, cutting the time for this beautiful "democracy in action" experience to just an hour and a half.

What happened to all of those people waiting in line? What happened to all of those people stuck in traffic jams, unable even to approach their caucus site? What happened to all of those people circling neighborhoods trying to find a parking place? What happened? I'll tell you what happened. They were disenfranchised. There is no way to get around that. The system failed to give these voters their rightful opportunity to express their vote, and it is time for this system to change.

The two major political parties in Minnesota, the DFL and the Republican Party, both experienced difficulties on caucus night, the DFL more so than the Republicans, and that fact was reflected in the party reactions to voter complaints in the days following the caucus. The DFL Party, which claimed more than 200,000 caucus goers, immediately led a charge calling for a switch to a primary system, spearheaded by Senators Ann Rest and Linda Scheid. Their proposed bill would "allow voters to participate in a primary similar to a general election without requiring them to be involved in the caucus process now run by political parties." DFL chairman Brian Melendez echoed those sentiments, saying that "switching to a presidential primary - while keeping the caucuses for other races and for party governance - is worth talking about." That's more like it!

But just as my hopes began to inch up for the restoration of sanity to my newly adopted state's "preference declaration" system, I read the Republican Party's response to the proposal. GOP Chairman Ron Carey said that he and other party leaders resolutely oppose "any change from our caucus system." He also, in a very flattering comment for diehard caucus lovers, stated that he believed that if Minnesota were to separate a primary from the caucus system, then "the only people who [would] show up for the caucuses would be the true insiders and geeks."

It is worthwhile to note, at this point, that the GOP turnout for the caucuses, while still enormous, numbered a mere 60,000, compared to the 200,000 racked up by those lovable DFLers. With an inflexible and disrespectful attitude such as Carey's, those numbers cannot be mere coincidence. And yet, even with that record-breaking turnout, in a state with a population of roughly 5.2 million, that is still fewer than 300,000 people who were able to exercise their sacred right to "express a presidential preference", a number that does not even come close to being truly representative of the "voice of the people".

Isn't low voter turnout something that both parties should still be concerned about, even in this year of "record-breaking" turnout? Let's face it, it's not hard to break a record if you're setting the bar low enough. The voice of the people spoke loudly and clearly in the aftermath of the precinct caucuses here in Minnesota on Super Tuesday; it said "Stop the caucus! I want to get off!"

So why isn't this need for change being supported by both parties? Easy: old habits die hard. Minnesota does it this way, because that's the way, with one brief, shining period of exception back in 1992, that Minnesota has done it since 1959. Prior to that year, interestingly enough, Minnesota was actually the first state to create a statewide primary system. The switch to a caucus system is nowadays blamed on primary upsets suffered by the two major parties during Dwight Eisenhower's campaign, and later during Estes Kefauver's.

So there was an upset! Upsets happen all the time - did New England decide not to participate in any future Super Bowls because they were upset this year by the New York Giants? In the end, no system is perfect, to be sure. But at least with a primary, all are welcome, and, here's the key: all are made to feel welcome.

When I expressed my concerns to the party representative - that I didn't know if I could make it to my caucus location within the time allotted, that I thought it was really exclusionary the way the caucus system was set up in Minnesota, that I really felt I was in danger of being disenfranchised - his response was not even remotely sympathetic:

"Gee, I'm sorry you feel that way. Welcome to Minnesota, and thank you for calling your Republican Party headquarters. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

The spotlight will be on Minnesota this summer, with the Republican National Convention in town. I can't think of a better way to paint the Party in a more favorable light than for them to move to make all comers welcome, not just the "geeks" and "activists". My vote is my activism. So yes, there is something else my representative can help me with: switch back to a primary and give me back my vote.