March 13, 2010 07:50 PM UTC

The Caucus Reconsidered

•  
• by: Dan Willis

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Is Colorado’s caucus system for party nominations outdated?

If so, what system should we use?

Some thoughts on the subject follow the jump. Please contribute your own ideas as well.

With Colorado’s caucus only a few days away, I find myself sitting amongst boxes of caucus materials at the Denver Dems office thinking there must be an easier way to do this.

I began looking at the candidate nomination process used by other states and now realize we are in a very small minority of states that go through this process.

I have not done an exhaustive seach, but from what I can tell, only Iowa has a system similar to ours for nominating candidates for state offices, and only 14 states use the caucus system for the presidential nomination process.

From what I can tell, most states use a process where candidates file for office and pay a filing fee, or submit a petition in lieu of the fee. Some use straight petition.

If we were to chuck the caucus/assembly process altogther, I think I would support a straight petition process where the petitions must be signed by members of the same party as the candidate. (We use this system now as an alternative to the assembly process).

However, I am more intrigued by an alternate process which still gives parties the ability to nominate their candidates but eases the burden of the precinct caucus from the backs of the county parties.

The precinct-level caucus, now required by law in Colorado, is an immense burden, both logisitically and financially to larger counties. For example, Denver now has 429 precincts. This means we must prepare materials for, find locations for, and train people to run, 429 individual meetings that all happen simultaneously. And all within a budget that receives no government funds and is subject to campaign-finance restrictions. The outcome of these caucuses are extememly important as they affect who our next elected officials will be; yet, it is nearly impossible to adequately monitor the entire process to accuracy, due to the immense number.

What if we caucused at a different level? I’ll continue to use Denver Dems as an example since I know our system best. Here, the Dems divide the city/county into subdistricts for adminstrative purposes. There are 9 House districts in (or substantially in) Denver and we divide each one in half giving us 18 subdistricts. This number changes, of course, every 10 years with redistricting.

What if we caucused at the subdistrict level? We could rent only 18 school auditoriums (easier to find than 429 classrooms!) do our business at that level and elect delegates to the county assembly and move on as we do now from there. The one major change is we would need a new process for electing/appointing precinct committee people.

If each county party has the choice what subdivision to use, smaller counties could stick with the precinct-level (or perhaps go straight to countywide) if that works for them, larger counties could caucus by House District, subdistrict, municipality, or whatever system they set up that works for them. Also this would allow each party to pick their system. So what works well from Dems in one county maybe doesn’t work so well for the GOP, or vice-versa. So each one would set up their own caucus process.

From the state partys’ prospective, the important information is who was elected delegates to the county assembly and what was their candidate preference. How we get to that result is not really their concern (well, it shouldn’t be) as long the system used meets the principles of the party.

This is my ramblings on a Sat. morning. What are yours. I got to get back to my 429 caucus packets now.