Openshaw: A Call to the Caucus

Utah's political caucuses took place this week: last Tuesday for Democrats and last Thursday for Republicans. If you have never been to a caucus, it's great to come to increase your part in self government. If you have attended before, come to lend your strength. These two nights are what it's all about -- the vote before the vote. Opponents of the neighborhood voice say there is little participation in caucuses. Prove them wrong.
A major talking point of Count My Vote was the decreased political participation of women. This has been a state and national concern--a long-standing irritant, with charges that the Founders were sexists in not granting women the right to vote. It is, in fact, politically correct to make that accusation, but the facts don't agree.
The 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the vote (suffrage) in 1919. Unfortunately, it also took from the states their constitutional right to set voting policies, which increased voracious federal control. The states were moving forward in this area, as they should. Western states had given women the vote decades before: Wyoming in 1869, and Utah officially in1896.
If we judge the past by the present, we mistakenly overlook cultural differences and can brand women's earlier non-voting status as discrimination. Not so. In early America's world of intact families, most women, centered on the home, were politically uninvolved by choice. The male, as head of household, voted for the family. Women's entry into commercial life was decades away, and the flood of single parent families, supported by big government "daddy" and its welfare checks, did not explode until Lyndon B. Johnson's 1968 Great Society. Both led, inevitably, to suffrage for women.
While early American women played a limited role outside the home, the impression that they were unequal (and thus kept from voting by discrimination) is challenged by Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville's fascinating description of America and its women in the early 1800s. He related that American men esteemed their female counterparts and "constantly display an entire confidence in the understanding of a wife...her mind is just as fitted as that of a man to discover the plain truth and her heart as firm to embrace it."
De Toqueville's important writings give a consistently invaluable picture of colonial America. He shows the equal worth given to both genders and compares this with the European movement to "make men and women into beings not only equal, but alike," to give both the same functions, rights and duties, which he said would leave both "degraded." He disclaims our modern charge of discrimination against women when he says: "The Americans do not think that men and women have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they...consider them...of equal value...(and) believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other."
His explanation of American families in the 1800s clarifies their voting policies: "every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object and that the natural head (of the family)... is man." He continued: "I never observed that the women of America consider conjugal (marriage) authority as a ...usurpation of their rights nor ...thought themselves degraded by submitting to it. It appeared...they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will...it is not the practice...to clamor for the rights of women."
The right to vote was not an issue among most early American women. It was in this spirit that the constitutional right to vote was confined to males; not to exclude women, but place them in a voting team.
De Toqueville concluded: "If I were asked...to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of... (Americans) ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply, to the superiority of their women."
In today's world, we prize the insights, participation, and votes of women and men of all ages. We need all of us to participate is self-government...even after the Caucuses. Join us this week at the caucuses and after to continue the creation of influence from the grassroots. Utah and every state needs your voice.

"Count My Vote" Distances Election System from Voters

Utah is embroiled in contention over its elections. Our caucus system to select election candidates is under attack from the Count My Vote (CMV) initiative. Under former governor Mike Leavitt, CMV intends to take over Utah elections, end our neighborhood participation, and dump Utah into political primaries -- the big money, battle-to-the-booth brawls that mimic national elections. CMV splays slogans, platitudes, and catch phrases across the media, but what they are not giving us is a straight story. They want us to abandon self-government for the power, prestige, and patronage behind this initiative. A compromise has emerged to head off the takeover. The Utah Senate backed the compromise, and the caucus system, in last Thursday's near-unanimous 26 to 2 vote to keep Senate Bill 54, the compromise, alive in the legislative process.

The underlying problem in this tug-of-war is poor participation in elections, both state and national. Voter participation is down in Utah, and nationwide. "Why" is up for grabs: too many distractions, increased apathy, less personal responsibility for freedom, increased "government-gimme," despair? It's hard to say.

The national elections give a snapshot of the problem. Utah performed poorly in 2012. Eighty percent of registered voters cast ballots, but half a million unaffiliated voters bailed, for an overall total of 57 percent, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Utah is among the bottom 10 states for national voter turnout, and Count My Vote proponents blame the caucus system. They promise to involve more people in the selection process and increase voter turnout. While everyone wants that, several state senators say there is nothing in Count My Vote to produce those benefits.
Many states, such as California and Connecticut, previously had caucus-type procedures and now mourn their abandonment. States that switched to primaries got less voter involvement, not more, according to Curt Bramble, sponsor of SB 54.
Why do Utahns slouch at the polls? With our one main party, too many complacently believe that a Republican is a Republican is a Republican -- all vanilla. Not so. Republicans rival the BYU Creamery for flavors: liberal, conservative, libertarian, constitutional, progressive, moderate and uninvolved, for starters. The opposite ends of the Republican Party vary as much as baseball and ballet, Ferraris and Jeeps. You cannot be just a Republican. You may disagree vehemently with the flavor of the Republican running; chocolate is not strawberry, you know. You get involved with politics in Utah for the same reason you make yourself part of any trip to the Creamery: to be sure you get the flavor you want.
Count My Vote rankles the informed. Supporters collecting petition signatures to put Count My Vote on the 2014 ballot are backed with big bucks -- thus the sardonic title Buy My Vote -- and the average Joe drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid doesn't "get" the issue. Signatures piled onto CMV petitions at a recent gun show in St. George, as those uninformed on the issue and seduced by the two-second spiel to "make their vote count," mindlessly gripped the pen and signed on the dotted line.
When questioned, few understood the initiative, but signed anyway: "Hey, it's a Republican thing! Can't be bad, right?" Those abreast of the issue ground their teeth and remembered anew why we must understand our governing system to make wise choices.
Voters must also have accurate information to choose wisely, and they aren't getting it from Count My Vote. Not only is there no evidence that a switch to primaries will produce greater voter involvement, but the current caucus system does not deny people a voice, as CMV advocates claim, it gives them one. We have some obvious deception here, and Count My Vote is not playing a fair ball game.
The mood in the Senate chambers for last Thursday's hearing on SB 54 was overwhelmingly positive, as the vote totals showed. Utah's leaders obviously recognize the value of the caucus system and want to keep it. That's a clear message to us to do the same.