In our quadrennial Iowa civics lesson, we’re reminded that the Democrats report delegate totals, not vote counts.  That’s not good enough for Gilbert Cranberg, former editor of the editorial page of The Des Moines Register, Herb Strentz, former executive secretary of Iowa’s Freedom of Information Council (and a former editorial mentor here at Iowa Independent), and Glenn Roberts, former director of research for The Register.

“As nongovernmental organizations, political parties are free to adopt whatever rules they favor,” they write. “But the press does not have to be a party’s silent partners. The news media need to quit tolerating the practice of denying the public access to factual information about how much support each Democratic candidate actually has on caucus night.”

That information would certainly be interesting, but labeling the process itself “undemocratic” is unfair.  The caucuses are as democratic as it gets.  But they aren’t a direct democracy — they’re a representative democracy.  A complicated, multi-level representative democracy, but still a democracy.Those delegates that the national press views as mere number complicators are living, breathing people, neighborhood-level leaders elected to represent the Democrats of their precinct at a county convention.  This convention chooses the district and state convention delegates that choose the national convention delegates.  And it’s the national convention delegates, not the raw vote count, that determines the nomination.

The county convention also has some statutory authority.  If there’s a vacancy in a courthouse office and a special election is needed, there’s no primary.  The county convention chooses the nominee, and in a county dominated by one party, that can be decisive.  In my county, conventions have nominated three county candidates in the last dozen years.  Conventions can also choose nominees if a primary is indecisive and no candidate wins more than 35 percent.  After a four-way split in the 2002 primary, the 5th District Republican convention essentially elected Steve King to Congress.

In any representative democracy, there are variations in turnout.  Birds of a feather tend to flock together, so any districted election system tends to lump similar types of people together.  Look, for example, at the U.S. House.  Within a state, districts have the same census population, and each district gets one representative.  In California, 2006 congressional district turnout ranged from 61,000 to 276,000 in 53 districts with the same on-paper population. 

In more homogeneous Iowa, voter turnout in 2006 varied from 180,399 in the 5th District to 223,082 in the 3rd.  Reporting the raw vote totals gives us a Republican lead — 522,388 to 492,937 — but obscures the more important fact that while Steve King ran up the score, the Democrats won the close ones and earned three seats to the GOP’s two. 

Who would you say won that contest?  Would you consider a “Republicans win” headline misleading?

Cranberg, Strenz and Roberts, in demanding the raw vote count, in effect want to write that headline.  They prefer the simpler totals the GOP provides.  But the Republican vote count is not directly connected to the nomination process.  After the presidential vote, which the GOP openly calls a “straw poll,” county convention delegates are elected without presidential preference.  By that time, an untold number of people have gone home.

Sports fans, look at it this way, what would you rather read: the team’s won-loss record, or points for and against?  I remember a couple years back, at midseason my beloved Green Bay Packers had a 2-7 record while outscoring their opponents.  We had a fluke 49-3 win, and lost all the close ones.

In an earlier story, I compared two Johnson County precincts with the same number of delegates.  Iowa City Precinct 18 is an activist hotbed, and 534 people attended the 2004 caucuses.  North Liberty Precinct 1 is full of new voters, and only 171 attended.  But based on voting behavior in 2000 and 2002, each had 10 delegates.  Those 10 delegates represent the Democratic voters of the precinct — ALL the Democratic voters, both the activists and the once-every-four-years people.  You could argue that in this sense, the caucus numbers are more representative than the raw vote count, because they are inclusive of the weak general election voters that the Democrats depend on in November.

Cranberg, Strenz and Roberts also raise the point:

It is possible that a second or third-tier candidate could garner a surprising 10 percent or 12 percent of the popular vote statewide and get zero delegates. (That’s because to be in the running for a delegate a candidate must have support from at least 15 percent of the people at a precinct caucus.) He or she may have done two or three times as well as expected among Iowa’s Democratic voters and get no recognition for it.

That’s true.  Is that fair?  Maybe.  Because what does a surprising 10 percent mean in terms of real progress to the nomination?  Zero.  Once upon a time, the caucuses were measured as a small first step, and the national media prominently kept track of delegate counts toward the nomination.  Now, the early states are an end in themselves, but at the end of the day it’s still that delegate count that really matters.

It would be nice to see the two sets of numbers, raw vote and delegate count, side by side, treated equally.  But does anyone really believe anyone would pay any attention to the result that in the official sense matters, the delegate count?  Cranberg, Strenz and Roberts  openly acknowledge, “Little or no attention is paid to the Republican delegate count, which the press does not even bother to report.” 

Of course, all this side steps the real reason the raw vote isn’t reported: New Hampshire thinks that’s too much like a primary, and the convoluted results are one of the prices we pay for being first.

Iowa Republicans have the same multi-level convention process as the Democrats: Caucus-goers elect county convention delegates, who choose congressional district and state delegates.  The district and state delegates choose the delegates for the national convention.  But Iowa Republicans have none of the preference group and viability business that makes the Democratic caucuses so complex.

“The caucus result from the straw poll has no binding on the county convention or the state convention,” said Todd Versteegh, who’s helping organize the Republican caucuses in Johnson County.  He said Republican delegates are elected at large, after the presidential vote, by the whole caucus. “We don’t allocate in terms of percentages, you’re just a delegate.”The Republicans, with their simpler process, don’t start their caucuses till 7, a half hour after the Democrats.  The Republican sign-in process is similar to the Democrats.  There will be a list of registered Republicans in the precinct, and if you’re not on the list you can register, re-register, or change party. 

On one procedural matter, the Republicans are making a point on a hot election law issue: the Republicans will ask you for an ID, while the Democrats aren’t.  “There is ID on there, just to verify the person is who they sat they are,” said Versteegh.  Under most circumstances, you don’t have to show ID to vote in Iowa, but the caucuses are party meetings and not elections so the parties can make their own rules.

“Requiring an ID to vote is a very touchy issue,” said Iowa Democratic Party political director Norm Sterzenbach, who’s working on caucus arrangements and training.  “We spend a great deal of time messaging that we trust people.”

This year Republicans are, in select locations, setting up “Super-caucus” sites where several precincts meet at one building.  The hope is to draw high-level surrogate speakers or even the candidates themselves, along with national media attention.  One place the GOP hopes to have a super-caucus, Versteegh says, is Coralville.

The GOP’s first item of business is election of a permanent chair and then “we go straight into it,” says Versteegh.  “The first thing you’ve got to do in your presidential year is your presidential straw poll.”

The Republicans have an actual paper ballot.  It doesn’t list any candidates, says Versteegh, just write in whoever you want.  There’s a little speaking time where folks makes a short pitch for their candidate, then you vote.  It’s a secret ballot, with none of the standing in front of the neighbors and bargaining that the Democrats have.  This means second choices matter less to Republicans than they do to Democrats.

County convention delegates are apportioned in the same fashion as the Democrats.  It’s based on the top of the ticket vote in the last two general elections (Bush 2004 and defeated governor candidate Jim Nussle in 2006).  But the delegates get little attention because the Republicans give the media a hard vote count.

After voting is done, the Republicans count up their votes and call a touch-tone hot line in Des Moines to report the vote count results. “Ronald Reagan 76 votes, Abe Lincoln 44 votes, Eisenhower 27 votes, and Nixon 1.”  Unlike the Democrats, where a  precinct’s impact on the caucus result is frozen based on a delegate count, higher caucus turnout in a Republican precinct means more influence on the outcome.  “A vote is a vote,” said Versteegh.

Voting should be done in plenty of time for people to catch the 8:00 TV programs, or the second quarter of the football game.  About this time, Democrats are still dealing with realignment.

Once the votes — remember, “straw poll” votes, they’re called  — are counted, the delegates are elected by all the caucus goers who choose to stay.  Then the caucus moves on to election of party officers and debate of the platform, just as the Democrats do.

Who choose to stay or go after the straw poll vote can have a big impact on the delegates.  Take the dead presidents example above: Reagan 76 votes, Lincoln 44 votes, Eisenhower 27 votes, and Nixon 1.  Could the Reagan supporters outvote the Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Nixon folks and elect all Reagan delegates with just over half the support?  Or did the Reagan folks go home, while the Lincoln people stayed to elect the delegates?  “It’s not divvied up by candidate,” said Versteegh. 

By the time any non-Iowan figures that out, the candidates are safely in New Hampshire.