The most significant vote many Coloradans will take this election, besides picking a new president, is whether to completely change the way we practice democracy in this state.
Proposition 131 would substitute our state’s 100-year-old system of “one-person, one vote” for a nonpartisan primary and “ranked-choice” voting.
Lots of pros and cons have been flying around about this huge change in the way we vote, but the biggest con I see is that it greatly diminishes the value and impact of direct democracy: getting together in person to deliberate face to face. That happens right now in neighborhood precinct caucuses where we can hash out issues, candidates and differences of opinion.
For those of us who believe the practice of democracy is much more than voting, this feels like giving up entirely. This vote will kill caucuses and direct democracy, in which people like you and me participate in a meaningful way in our politics. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s something you do. And if we stop doing it ourselves, democracy crumbles.
Instead of separate primaries in the spring for Democrats and Republicans like we have now, all candidates seeking a certain office would appear on one ballot regardless of party affiliation or non-affiliation, for elections. Parties can still have caucuses and state assemblies to endorse candidates for that ballot, according to the language of the initiative, but those assemblies will be meaningless when it comes to deciding who is actually on the ballot.
There is no winnowing, meeting or vetting of candidates ahead of time: Anyone with enough signatures and money can get on the ballot. My guess is caucuses will soon wither and die if 131 is passed.
Such a so-called jungle primary would be held for candidates for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, Colorado University Board of Regents, State Board of Education and legislature. For other offices like county commissions, city councils and DAs, parties could still nominate candidates, which would appear on a different part of your ballot.
The top four vote-getters for each office in the jungle primary regardless of party would advance to the general election, where ranked-choice voting would be used to determine the winner.
Right now, the candidate with the most votes wins the general election, regardless of the percentage they win. That changes under the new system, which requires the winning candidate to have 50% of the vote.
Your head hurt yet?
So come the general, voters would get the option of ranking their favorite candidates 1, 2, 3 and 4 in order of preference.
If no one wins a majority on the first counting, that’s when the fun begins. The fourth-place candidate is removed and their second-, third- and fourth-place votes are distributed to the other candidates. This process goes on until one candidate has a majority of the votes and wins the election.
I know, I know, that sounds complicated. And it requires a lot more from voters, too, one day every couple years when they are filling out their ballot. What it doesn’t require is any sort of direct collaboration of us citizens with each other.
The democracy I was taught requires face-to-face interaction of real people, together, where we can compare notes and meet candidates in a house or school or other actual physical place. Colorado’s caucus system asked this of us: that we meet our neighbors, talk about candidates and issues together, then pick the best candidates among us to run for office, or become precinct committee people or delegates to county assemblies, including those that elect delegates to the presidential nominating conventions.
Our founders invented caucuses as the best way to grow good candidates for political office from the literal grass-roots. They believed voters should get together in person and actually pick the best candidates from among themselves, not let candidates pick their voters as we do now.
Funny, but the caucus system was launched in Colorado for a lot of the same reasons ranked-choice voting is being touted now: to limit the power of party bosses and attract more grassroots involvement.
The Colorado legislature adopted the caucus system in a special session called by Gov. John F. Shafroth in August 1910 as part of a package of progressive reforms.
The late, great Sue O’Brien, former colleague of mine and longtime editorial page editor of The Denver Post, whom some called “the conscience of Colorado,” was particularly fond of the Colorado Caucus, because it creates repeated opportunities for the common person, the average, ordinary citizen, to participate in a meaningful way in running our country, and possibly even serving in elected public office.
“Look around modern society,” Sue once wrote in defense of the caucus. “We have a woeful lack of what Harvard scholar Robert Putnam calls “social capital” — the dynamism that comes from doing things together and making community decisions together. Yet the spate of election “reforms” we’re seeing these days almost seems designed to stomp out the last vestiges of community collaboration.”
After the pandemic, the last thing we need is less interaction, less community, less social capital. Social media and Zoom have virtualized all of us, and now we have a proposal that would make our isolation from each other even worse. Some would argue that isolation is what is causing the very polarization that is tearing democracy apart.
Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade, sensing that we are all missing something after the pandemic, has been driving a “1,000 Neighborhood Gatherings” call to action for residents throughout the city to get to know their neighbors, strengthen existing relationships with people who live nearby, reduce loneliness and isolation, and fortify mental stamina.
This ranked-choice thing would enfeeble over 3,000 caucuses held in neighborhoods across Colorado in election years right now. Why would we give up on these community creators we already have, when we’re desperately seeking new ones?
“Voting and following politics are relatively undemanding forms of participation,” writes Putnam in his influential “Bowling Alone.” “In fact, they are not, strictly speaking, forms of social capital at all, because they can be done utterly alone.”
“We can be utterly alone, too, when we perform the two other actions modern politics seems to want to limit us to: writing checks and watching attack ads on TV,” Sue wrote. “We’re systematically replacing ‘social capital’ with plain old monetary capital.”
Colorado’s traditional caucus-convention system, in contrast, rewards “shoe-leather and diligence.” It provides a low-cost way for aspirants to work the neighborhoods, investing energy instead of dollars.
“But even more important than the caucus’ benefits for candidates is its benefit for ordinary citizens,” Sue declared. “It’s a vibrant neighborhood forum for hashing out ideas — the last remaining arena in which you can get on the first rung of the ladder toward political effectiveness by just showing up.”
I’ve participated in precinct caucuses and covered precinct caucuses in Iowa. I got to personally walk up and talk to four different presidential candidates on the street in Iowa, as did a lot of Iowans. And I got to eat some pretty good chicken-fried steak at the same time.
Sue’s favorite memory of covering the Iowa caucuses was of escorting a big-deal network analyst to his very first caucus in an American Legion hall in Iowa. This was a political expert well into his 50s, yet he’d never seen a caucus; primaries had always been his beat. She said he was blown away. For the first time in years of covering politics, he told Sue, he’d seen the true face of America.
He was right. “Caucuses offer a peculiarly intimate view of a community and its people,” Sue wrote in her defense way back in 2002. “They’ll amaze you with the quality of caring and thought participants bring to the discussion. And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you’ll see new, young leaders find their first toehold in the process.”
I remember an extraordinary feeling participating in caucuses. I felt like I was creating something important together with other people, creating something that was larger than myself. It must be how a violinist in a symphony feels, I remember thinking, after he creates an extraordinary work of art in concert and harmony with his fellow musicians.
David Mathews, in the book “Civic Intelligence,” put it this way: “Good political talk … is where we recognize the connectedness of things — and our own connectedness. … Good political talk is also where we discover what is common amidst our differences.”
You might say it’s where we discover the true face of Colorado.
