This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Greg Erickson argued last Sunday that as a candidate for political office, he really likes Utah's arcane nominating system. And why not? After all, it makes it vastly easier to sidestep the very people whose voices should count the most: the 99 percent of Republican or Democratic voters who have to live with the candidate choices that a relative handful of convention delegates fob off on everyone else.
This archaic system is the basis for an arrangement that serves up candidates from the state legislature to Congress who play only to the extreme ideologues of both parties. That's why school vouchers never die, why sensible immigration policies never get adopted, and why the John Birch political agenda keeps coming back to haunt Utah politics.
In "Keep Utah's caucus system" (Opinion, Dec. 11), Erickson argued that our one-of-a-kind nomination process has served Utah well since statehood, and therefore it's good. However, that's a misstatement of history. Our present oddball system is the product of many changes over the years.
That the current iteration has failed is not the fault of voters who find its complexities bewildering. Rather, the failure is a continuing testament to the corrupting influence of unregulated money in our election process and the desire of incumbent legislators to make their re-election as easy as possible by providing a very effective way to kill off would-be opponents.
Erickson argues that an open primary, where all voters have a say in who the candidates shall be, is a bad thing, because convention delegates are ever so much better informed than anyone else. While there is zero empirical evidence for this insulting assertion, let's assume that by some miracle, all 70,000 Republican voters in Bountiful showed up to the caucuses next year, which will most assuredly be held in venues too small to accommodate all but a fraction.
The sheer numbers of participants would quickly overwhelm the informal balloting typical for these meetings. There are no checks of voter registration. A tiny group of maybe 300 delegates will be elected to go to the nominating convention, many by concealing their actual candidate preferences.
Here's the real rub: Suppose that 75 percent of these caucus attendees want Erickson to be the candidate. Their wishes are not binding on the delegates that the majority elects. If Erickson's opponents spend more on delegate food and boodle than he does, the delegates, who usually have their own agenda anyway (remember Bob Bennett), can stop the Erickson campaign dead in its tracks if another candidate gets 60 percent of the delegate vote. No one will ever know how the delegates voted or why.
What happens in the two or three weeks between the caucus and the convention is simply an expensive fraud on the higher principle of majoritarian politics.
Proponents of our minority-rule system argue that it follows constitutional principles, whereby we have our laws made by elected officers who represent the rest of us. This artifice conveniently overlooks the historical fact that one of the great accomplishments of this American experiment with democracy has been to confer the voting franchise upon every American citizen, irrespective of wealth, gender, religion, or race.
Utah voters deserve to collectively decide who should be on the ballot. The direct primary nomination process works with enormous success in the election of municipal officers, and the sky has not fallen, nor are candidates bankrupted.
It's high time to extend that system to legislative and statewide offices.
David R. Irvine is an attorney in Salt Lake City. He represented a Bountiful House district as a Republican for four terms and is a former chairman of the Davis County Republican Party.