Iowa's screwy system

John Fund lays out some of the many reasons why the Iowa caucuses are a travesty of the democratic process and such a poor system for determining who should be a party's nominee. First of all, the fact that you have to come out for one or two hours on a snowy January evening means that the turnout is quite low.

Caucuses occur only at a fixed time at night, so that many people working odd hours can't participate. They can easily exceed two hours. There are no absentee ballots, which means the process disfranchises the sick, shut-ins and people who are out of town on the day of the caucus. The Democratic caucuses require participants to stand in a corner with other supporters of their candidate. That eliminates the secret ballot.

There are reasons for all this. The caucuses are run by the state parties, and unlike primary or general elections aren't regulated by the government. They were designed as an insiders' game to attract party activists, donors and political junkies and give them a disproportionate influence in the process. In other words, they are designed not to be overly democratic. Primaries aren't perfect. but at least they make it fairly easy for everyone to vote, since polls are open all day and it takes only a few minutes to cast a ballot.

All the talk about how wonderful it is for ordinary Iowans to meet candidates up close in the months ahead of time really means that it is great for party activists to be the ones who choose the candidate rather than the general electorate in Iowa. It's just a bigger, more convoluted system replacing the smoke-filled rooms of yore.

As Fund explains, the fun doesn't stop there.

Democrats have a mind-numbingly complex system in which participants divide up into "candidate preference groups" by standing up. No paper ballots are used. Those candidates who don't get support from 15% or more of those attending a local caucus are deemed not to be "viable," and their supporters have to realign with some other candidate.

"That's when it gets kind of crazy," says Mark Daley, a former spokesman for the Iowa Democratic Party. "There will be people screaming back and forth . . . and senior citizens with calculators trying to do the math." Only after all this are county convention delegates allocated among the candidates and the results phoned in to the state Democratic Party. Delegates aren't actually allocated until the Democratic county conventions in March.

Not all local caucuses are equal. The "entrance" polls of voter preferences that you will see reported Thursday night are likely to be from urban areas, which may shortchange candidates like John Edwards, Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson, who have campaigned more heavily in rural areas. "It's entirely possible that John Edwards could come in a stunning second when all the votes are in, but the country will have gone to bed thinking he only took third place," says Howard Fineman of Newsweek.

Rural Iowa matters for another reason in the Democratic contest. In order to encourage candidates to campaign in farming areas, state Democrats have tilted the delegate allocation so that rural areas are disproportionately represented in the final results. This sometimes can lead to bizarre results. As Roger Simon of Politico.com notes, "the turnout in some precincts is so small that a single family--let's say four people--can determine the winner. In other precincts, only one person will show up and win for his candidate by being the only person in the room." In small-turnout caucus meetings, ties are resolved by a coin toss or drawing lots. In 2004, four precincts saw literally no one show up to vote in the Democratic caucus.

I blame the media for all the importance given to the Iowa caucuses. Ever since Jimmy Carter camped out in Iowa for a year ahead of time, the mythology of the Iowa caucuses has grown out of all perspective of what it represents. It's a straw poll like other such events in the year preceding an election where organization and money can corral party activists into giving the impression that one candidate is in the lead. If the media could just resist the temptation to talk about Iowa as if it mattered in the real world, then we could all go back to ignoring it as we did in the pre-Carter years.

Perhaps if the results from Iowa show a clear victory for Huckabee and Edwards who then go on to sink into obscurity in the primary votes coming throughout the rest of January and February 5, we can start ignoring the votes of a hundred thousand activists from such an unrepresentative state and candidates will stop putting all their eggs in the Iowans' baskets.