An article on why caucuses aren't democratic
Link: http://www.wepolls.com/p/6839729
Excerpt:
A primary system, which works very much like the general election, is where one person fills out a ballot and votes. One person, one vote. Confidential. Simple. It's what the United States' political system is built upon. People can vote any time on voting day, or even early via absentee ballot.
In a caucus it's anything but simple. First, no one's vote is private. It's very public, which allows for votes to be bought. Second, caucusing only occurs during certain hours and must be done in person, so it discriminates heavily against people who work evenings, don't have daycare, are ill, are serving over seas or are out of state, the elderly, those without transportation, the elderly, and so on.
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But saying they're not democratic is to adopt a narrow definition of "democracy" and then tacitly use it in a way that everybody must agree with.
There are two extreme views of society. The first is that there is no "society," just a collection of individuals. This is Thatcher's view. It's very atomistic and there's something to be said for it. The second is that society is a single thing, and acts and decides as a collective. In practical terms it has to--for many decisions there can be only one choice made, and the losers are taken along for the ride.
Both views are right, depending on context. There are times when the individual's needs aer dominant. Totalitarian ideologies miss this. There are times when the majority justly foists its view on the entirety of the population. Extreme libertarian viewpoints (aka "anarchist"
also miss this.
Both views are unacceptably wrong because at the extremes they lead to horrible outcomes. The demos as a group of points, unrelated and unresponsive to each other; the demos as a mob acting with one mind, forcing every and all possible decisions on the minority.
Most electoral systems in the US are fairly atomistic. They poll society and interpret the sum of many individual, one-time, snap-shot choices as the will of the people. You get a simple answer, but even something like a preference ballot reformulation of the electoral process shows that the answer isn't so much simple as simplistic.
Caucuses are more collective and less atomistic. They recognize the insight in preference balloting and build that into the system. They require that politics not be impersonal blips on a piece of paper, processed anonymously so that there's no responsibility--you want to vote for a person because a blue spider told you to, that's just as good a justification as voting because you honestly understand the issues and agree with your candidate, simply because there is no justification, no give and take. But if you take your view public and stand to be convinced or do the convincing, that "blue spider" argument isn't a justification and you look loony.
Caucuses in principle avoid vote buying by keeping them local. You know who's there and if there's a lot of vote buying you see it. The process is undermined as it should be and the corruption is visible to sunlight. If society as a collective is corrupt, it's not going to be any different with secret ballots (it just makes the corruption a bit harder to carry out--it's still there, IMHO). If there's full participation and everybody's rationally committed to the good of the collective as s/he rationally construes it, they work. Then again, that's largely the same argument as for secret balloting.
"Democratic" included in-person, time-and-place constrained voting for most of its existence.
It's not the case that one of these is democratic and the others undemocratic. "Democracy" is a range of procedures with a fairly clear goal in mind. But the procedures depend on how you construe society, and even "democracy" itself has some wiggle room because it's only "fairly" clear. Yeah, you can come up with a definition whose form almost everybody agrees on. It's just that you have to apply the definitions of the words you used in defining "democracy," and that's not so easy. Even "we the people" is a problem. Some define what appears to be a sweepingly inclusive phrase to exclude large chunks of society. Those who composed it did so, to their shame; many now do so and believe it to redound to their glory.
