Posted by: McQ on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 If you measure them by the ability to participate, not very: Because the caucuses, held in the early evening, do not allow absentee voting, they tend to leave out nearly entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have baby sitters, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, and many others who work in retail, at gas stations and in other jobs that require evening duty.So what do they really indicate? Well perhaps what they indicate is how efficient and proficient campaigns are at getting their voters to the caucus. There's a reason why votes in Iowa are computed by average dollars spent by a campaign. But do these caucuses really reflect the true selection of a state's voters? Probably not. And while the argument could be made that primaries of all sorts may not reflect the true will of the people of a given state, at least in a primary election process, the rules that normally govern voting there are the same for primary voting. While it is true a primary that the vote itself may reflect an overabundance of political activists, the opportunity for all voters to cast their vote exists. Not so in Iowa. And then, especially on the Democratic side, even if you do caucus, there's no guarantee that your vote will mean anything: While the Republican caucuses are fairly simple — voters can leave shortly after they declare their preferences — Democratic caucuses can require more time and multiple candidate preferences from participants. They do not conform to the one-person, one-vote rule, because votes are weighted according to a precinct’s past level of participation. Ties can be settled by coin toss or picking names out of a hat.So what does it all mean? It means a select group who can meet at the precise time and place and can stay to endure the entire process may have a hand in selecting the winner of the party caucus they attend - unless they're Democrats. Then there's no guarantee, given their precincts past participation level, that their effort will have any effect at all. Sounds like fun huh? And oh so "fair". And people bitch about the electoral college. UPDATE: Hillary offers a solution of sorts: Meet Hillary Clinton's secret weapon in Iowa: baby-sitters.Pretty smart ploy, given the ground rules of the caucus. What it means in the long run goes back to my point about the reality of what the caucuses represent: "Well perhaps what they indicate is how efficient and proficient campaigns are at getting their voters to the caucus." |
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