The Importance of Utah's Caucuses

Protected Wetlands in Southern Provo

As someone who grew up in California and takes the responsibility of voting very seriously, I have been greatly impressed by the caucus system in Utah. The caucus system in Utah is incredible. It is a state treasure. In my mind, it is the only thing that stands between Utah politics and the toxic politics that I fled in California, and it is more than hyperbole for me to assert that the primary reason I left California was its toxic politics.

In California, as with many other states, elections are largely decided with money, and the information is largely controlled by a powerful and politically uniform media. It takes real work to scrape together enough information to make an informed decision on candidates, parsing their statements closely to learn about their ideology, scrutinizing their endorsements rather than just accepting well-recognized names and happy-sounding organizations as de-facto evidence of a candidate's merit. When the amount of information available was particularly bad, even their hobbies and interests could provide a clue as to what ideologies they aligned with. I would gather information from news reports, Facebook pages, and people I could find who had worked with the candidates. I would write letters to local candidates as well.

Writing letters was particularly interesting, because, almost always, when I had formed some idea of who the candidate was via other methods, the letters served to confirm my findings. I would go through my letters and grade the candidates' answers based on a uniform set of criteria in order to be as objective as possible.

As I gathered the information, I would write about it and publish it. I knew others who paid lip service to wanting to be informed voters, so I made sure to let them know that I was gathering up all of the information I could and citing (linking to) my source, so that if they went to my page, they could benefit from my digging and from some of my original materials such as the letter responses.

It was a bit depressing to go out and vote, because, let's face it, whether your vote counts or not, your vote doesn't matter. No matter who you are, your vote has never made a difference in your entire life, for any issue any bigger than a student election. That may not be what you want to believe, or what people popularly want to tell you about voting, but it is unambiguously true. There are special interests that are actually highly motivated to convince you that your vote matters, but that is a lie, and it is a fairly transparent one.

As I pondered the meaning of my vote, and the problem of the uninformed voter, a number of ideas struck me. First, fewer voters would most likely be better. More specifically, compared to what we do now, it would be be better if voting were harder and if we didn't guilt people into voting. The result of this would be that the average voter would be a more motivated, interested, informed, and discerning one. This would all but destroy the media's grasp on elections, and reduce the cost of elections both for the government and for candidates, so that this particular aspect of money in politics would become less of a problem. Of course, if this is all that is done, then it would increase the effectiveness of voter fraud, and hence, we would see attempts to commit voter fraud increase. In fact, there are recent events in Utah that highlight how fewer voters create an increased incentive to commit voter fraud. Still, I think that if we stopped guilting people into voting, that it would be a good thing, and that efforts to increase voter turnout that sacrifice the reliability and security of our elections, are universally a bad thing. (Hence, I'm not a fan of vote-by-mail. Our current county clerk lost in convention because he illustrated one of a number of ways vote-by-mail can be problematic.)

I had another idea, however. Since people really do care about these elections, but are often driven away from them by the high amount of work that it takes to become informed, and the futility of voting, it struck me that we could allow small groups of voters to hold elections that they actually could make a difference in, to select somebody to cast a ballot for the group. Then, each individual voter would have to do only a small amount of work, to select someone, among people they might even already be familiar with, to represent their interests. The representatives would take on the responsibility of becoming informed about the multitude of issues. To me, in California, this seemed like a pipe dream, but it was an ideal that I was convinced would produce better results by producing better informed voting less prone to be swayed by hyperbole, and hence less prone to be swayed by large candidate coffers.

The current lack of voter participation is considered, by many to be a huge problem in our democracy. County clerks often see it as their job to do something to increase voter turnout. Somehow, it is imagined, if we don't get these people out to vote, then our Democracy will be less of something. The reality is, that this is not a problem in and of itself. It is a symptom of a problem. The problem, as many of our country's founders could have told you, is that we have come to rely too heavily on Democracy.

Despite all of the propaganda and hyperbole that has taught us that Democracy is a good thing, the history of Democracy does not uniformly bear this out. The founders understood that Democracy came with inherent problems. For one, Democracy was impractical over long distances. This is one excellent example of a consideration that is mitigated by modern technology, since information can now travel worldwide in less than second. However, this was not the only problem with democracy. Large groups of people have, historically, not always acted in a highly principled manner. Large groups develop into mobs which act with a kind of impetuous group emotion that has historically endangered not only the individuals that stand against the mob, but the members of the mob itself. Democracy, very easily becomes mobocracy.

Instead of structuring our government to have the form of a Democracy, the founders, after long and careful consideration and debate, opted to structure our federal government under the principles of a Republic.

Under a Republican form of government, smaller groups of people come together to elect representatives who then inform themselves and cast votes on their behalf. An understanding of this principle of Republicanism is at the root of a proposal by Sam Parker, who suggested dramatically increasing the number of representatives in the federal legislature in order to create what he felt would be a better ratio between representatives and citizens. I tend to think that such a dramatic increase would be impractical, and that a dramatically larger house of representatives would devolve into mobocracy itself. I like the idea of applying a system, much like the electoral college, to select our legislators.

In any case, with my pipe dream still in mind, I moved to Utah due to its excellent job opportunities, its healthier political climate (it is the state that gave us Mike Lee, after all), its accessible rural areas, and the fact that I had family that had moved here as well. I was amazed to discover that my pipe dream was not a pipe dream in Utah. It was a system that actually existed, and the benefits were manifestly easy to identify. The average voter in Utah seemed to be not any better than the average voter in California. That is, the voters don't seem to be any more informed. They don't care particularly about the principles of legitimate authority. They are easily swayed by big money spent on campaigns, and when evidence of corruption arises, they, somehow, are duped into thinking that voting for a winner is more meaningful than voting for what is right (even though such a vote will make no difference in who wins the election anyway), and so they tend to back the corrupt candidate that they think will win. Certainly, they are interested in different fundamental values, but given their options, they do no better at actually finding people who will promote those values than Californians do. (To be fair to Californians, the values of California's politicians only represent a minority of California's voters.) Californians are loyal to the letter D, and Utahns are loyal to the letter R, and Utahns seem to prefer candidates that won't articulate their opponent's disadvantages. Nevertheless, when Utahns select delegates, the delegates do a much better job of cutting through the hyperbole, and ousting corrupt politicians. They are, in my opinion, almost entirely responsible for the soundness of Utah's system of government.

An additional benefit I hadn't even imagined is the information that delegates make available to the public. In California, the major media is the only group that gets access to the big names in politics. In contrast to that, Utah's political system has, for generations, put the power in the hands of common people, the delegates, who are given many opportunities to question politicians. I would never get a response from Mitt Romney or Mike Kennedy if I wrote them personally. There are just too many people vying for their attention, but I can talk to a delegate, and I can get a delegate to ask a question. I can talk to delegates and find out from them what they have found out from grilling candidates. The treasure trove of information is one of the wonders of Utah politics. There is no rock for the politicians to hide under. When they dodge a question, the delegates know that they never got an answer.

But, to my dismay, the caucus system is under attack. SB 54 has largely gutted the real effectiveness of the caucus system. The information is still mostly there, but candidates are playing the game differently now. They don't have to be quite as transparent anymore. The voters ignore and overturn delegates' hard work to pick the most corrupt and likeable candidates. Big money, a smile, and name recognition decide elections now more than they used to, and eventually, if SB 54 is not overturned, the convention system will disappear and the mobs and special interests will rule in Utah just as effectively as they do in California.

Beyond all the stories of woe and extremism that are told by the self-interested newspapers and corrupt politicians, the real importance of the caucus system lies in the fact that it is the caucus system that makes Utah great. It's not Gary Herbert. It is not the LDS church. (Though, as a member, I like to imagine that the church may have indirectly helped preserve the caucus system.) It isn't even great statesmen like Mike Lee. It is the principle of Republicanism that has not yet died out here, that has led to the state's greatness. The caucus system is the bulwark defending Utah from the mobocracy and populism that have nearly overcome our once great nation.