ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, May 23, 1996 TAG: 9605230033
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MORTON NADLER
SO YOU think participation in primaries is low! Have you ever been to a caucus?
In the Democratic senatorial primary of 1994, 3,045 Democratic voters in Montgomery County helped choose Chuck Robb over Virgil Goode, Sylvia Clute and Nancy Spannaus to face Ollie North and perennial Republican candidate Marshall Coleman, running as an independent with John Warner's support. Of this number, 805 voted for Clute, giving her four times her statewide average. But 3,045 represented 31 percent of the 9,718 who turned out that November to vote for Robb.
In 1992, 46 Democrats carried the Montgomery County caucus for Bill Clinton, against 21 for Jerry Brown out of a total of 110!
In Virginia, the basic method for choosing candidates is the caucus and convention system. Primaries are held only when either an incumbent seeking re-election or the state committee of one of the parties requests them. This year, nobody in the Democratic Party with standing had asked for a primary, so we went the traditional caucus route.
How does one campaign in a traditional caucus? Quite simply, one asks for endorsement and pledges of support from the party regulars and activists. They are usually the only ones who turn out for a caucus. The caucus elects delegates to conventions held by congressional districts or statewide, depending on the candidate to be nominated - and the elected delegates go, sometimes at great personal expense.
Everybody knows how a primary works. Candidates campaign; voters decide; and on a given Tuesday, we go to the polls and vote for the candidate who has won our allegiance. If we don't feel strongly enough about "any of the above," we don't vote. Here the cost is laid on the candidates, the parties and other organizations, such as the [in]famous PACs.
Do you know how a caucus works? It is usually an object of solemn ritual.
1. You must be there before a stated time, when the doors are closed.
2. You register according to your voting precinct and sign a pledge that you will support the candidates of the party whose caucus you are attending (unenforceable in a court of law).
3. You assemble in the meeting hall and a) listen to a reading of the rules and vote their adoption; b) nominate and elect the permanent chair of the caucus, who is usually the temporary chair who presided over the adoption of the rules.
4. There follows a number of welcoming and congratulatory speeches, finally leading up to nominations and seconds, and votes.
You might be there for hours, versus the few minutes to sign in and vote in the booth in a primary.
Primaries are addressed to the general public; hardly anybody not close to the party is even aware that a caucus is in the works. Because there are rarely, if ever, simultaneous primaries in both parties and no party registration, we suffer from the phenomenon of "cross-over voting" where adherents of the opposing party vote in a primary to nominate the supposedly weaker candidate. But caucuses, because they are such closed events, present even greater risks.
In April of this year, "outsider" groups of Democrats in Montgomery County and Radford gave clear-cut majorities to Leslie Byrne in the Democratic senatorial preference caucuses, a feat not duplicated anywhere else in the state.
Byrne had entered the race late in 1995, almost a year after Mark Warner, operating from his position as chair of the state committee of the Democratic Party, had begun to sew up the nomination by obtaining pledges from local elected officials and members of the local party committees. It would have required adroit leadership and extensive local contacts in every jurisdiction to overcome this lead.
Our work for Sylvia Clute in 1994 gave us this. Indeed, it was only because of the contact list we had been able to assemble around the excitement of a primary that we were able to bring out 83 voters for Byrne's slate in Montgomery County, against a mere 60 for Warner.
Unfortunately, this was not duplicated elsewhere in the commonwealth.
The abuses of both the primary and the caucus systems could be eliminated by a very simple change in Virginia's electoral law: mandatory and simultaneous primaries for every contested nomination for state and federal elections. Then there would be no more "cross-over voting" and the process would be open to all. Maybe we will be able to bring Virginia into the 20th century in the 21st!
Morton Nadler of Blacksburg used to teach computer engineering at Virginia Tech, and is now retired.
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICSby CNB