In the training session for the La Plata County Democratic Party’s 2010 caucuses, a 36-page manual was distributed, with a bold-faced question on the front page: “Why is it so complicated?” The attached agenda, updated for the 2016 caucuses, was six pages long and, as it turns out, nearly impossible to enforce.
The colossal mixup of the March 1 caucuses, as referenced in the Herald’s March 15 editorial, where half the precincts wound up skipping the vote on the district attorney candidates, was hardly a surprise. To those of us to have gone through the caucus process for decades, the foul-up was a predictable consequence of the process itself.
At first glance, the evening caucuses appear to be an idyllic exercise in participatory democracy. Grassroots politics at its very best, a little Athenian republic in the grange hall. You visit with your like-minded friends and neighbors over coffee and doughnuts, exchange views on issues and candidates, then come to some mutually agreeable decisions. But in fact, the caucus process, both locally and nationally, has devolved into a convoluted exercise in exclusionary politics.
A major unintended consequence of the caucus system is the exclusion of the vast majority of party members: those who cannot – or would not – come to caucus on a late-winter Tuesday night. Among the perennially absent are: those who work at night; those who work long days; low-paid working mothers who have evening family chores at home (kids, dinner, rest); rural residents who have to cope with bad roads, remote locations or bad night vision; the old and the infirm; and last but not least, ethnic minorities who feel intimidated by both the arcane process and the activists who run it.
Democratic caucus attendance in La Plata County this year was 2,325, an all-time record. In mid-term election years like 2014 or 2010, caucus attendance is a minute fraction of that, rarely exceeding 500 countywide. Often, one, two or no people attend per precinct; the registered membership of the La Plata County Democratic Party is more than 11,000. The caucus system encourages an affluent, well-informed, largely white minority – between 2.7 percent (500) and 21 percent (2,324) of the membership – to make electoral decisions for the rest of us.
The caucus process is convoluted, cumbersome and nearly incomprehensible. The five successive layers – precinct, county, judicial district, state-representative district and state – yield a crisscrossed web of delegates, often pledged to different candidates at diverse levels or districts, with successive assemblies governed by complex, often inconsistent rules, Byzantine and mind-numbing, a veritable dream of the expert bureaucrat or the enterprising knave.
Pre-caucus training sessions, run by dedicated experts, are long and tiring, the math is daunting, and the expenses over the entire process – in time, space, travel, lodging – are far from trivial, mounting exponentially as delegates climb from precinct to county to district to state. When delegates at long last ascend to the state level, none but the affluent and leisurely are likely to have cleared the hurdles. Then, when you at last stagger onto the June primary, the presidential candidates are, mysteriously, off the ballot.
This veritable Rube-Goldberg machine invites both unintended glitches and deliberate mischief. It also invites a small core of dedicated activists to dominate the process and bend it to their will. Thus, during the recent Democratic Party’s Sixth Judicial District assembly, the 50-odd delegates were told by a party official that it was OK to vote for the entire membership because, after all, they were the best educated and best informed in the county. In other words, an oligarchy: government by a small, select elite.
It is time we consigned this undemocratic process to a merciful, long-overdue grave. Let the primary election, where all members can partake during 12 daytime hours – or better still, avail themselves of an easy mail-vote at home over two weeks – decide who we elect to public office. Let the party membership re-claim its birthright. Let democracy – like freedom – ring.
Tom Givon ranches near Ignacio. Reach him at tgivon@uoregon.edu. Steven C. Boos is an attorney with the firm of Maynes, Bradford, Shipps & Sheftel in Durango. Reach him at sboos@mbssllp.com.
