This week, a comparatively minuscule number of Colorado Democrats and Republicans will gather at churches and elementary schools around the state to engage in one of American democracy’s most arcane, useless, and undemocratic processes: caucus. And while I commend each and every one of the civically engaged Coloradans who chooses to participate — a number which even in Presidential election years has come to roughly 5% of eligible voters — I believe it is also high time for our thoroughly modern state to abolish the antiquated process which has long since been supplanted by more reliable and accessible methods of participation.
Unlike some other states which employ a caucus system, Colorado also has something else: full-blown primary elections in June. Voters not affiliated with a party are barred from caucuses, but will be able to choose which party’s primary to vote in this summer. Far from making the caucus system better, the presence of an actual primary election on the calendar renders the ongoing existence of the caucus system more ludicrous than its particulars already did.
In Colorado, the caucus system has three parts. The first part will occur this week, when voters schlep to their local precinct caucuses, where delegates will be chosen to attend the next step: county party assemblies. At county party assemblies, later this month, delegates will be chosen to attend the Colorado Democratic and Republican Parties’ statewide conventions, where that last group of delegates will finally cast ballots to choose which candidates will appear on the primary ballot (not including those candidates who have chosen to skip caucus entirely and access the primary ballot via signature collection). It’s a bad system.
So where did this bad system come from, and why on earth are we still using it?
Today’s caucus system — which in addition to Colorado’s hybrid setup is employed in states like Iowa, Nevada, and elsewhere — resembles nothing so much as the earliest forms of western democracy practiced by the Greeks and the Romans, and that’s not actually a good thing.
In ancient Athens, citizen assemblies voted on a whole host of issues, gathering publicly and using stones to do so. A citizen would cast a white stone for a yes vote, and a black stone for a no vote. As a system, it was both miles ahead of its time and desperately flawed. Like so many of the successive democracies, Athens fell prey to the impulse of powerful interests within democratic systems to more tightly circumscribe the line between who can and who cannot vote in ways which benefited those powerful interests. In Athens, this impulse towards exclusion was primarily borne by women and slaves.
Like the modern caucus system, Athenian democracy did not have to reach far for the exclusivity it craved: in the 4th and 5th centuries BCE, only 10-20% of the eligible Athenian population routinely engaged in elections.
As an exercise in direct democracy, the Athenian system was also a warning of some of democracy’s flaws: the excitability of a mob, the tendency towards demagoguery, and the ability to shout-down the better angels of society. In 416 BCE, for instance, following a dispute in which the citizens of the nearby island of Melos refused to ally themselves with the Athenians, the Athenians invaded and conquered Melos. When deciding what to do with their conquered subjects, the voters of Athenian democracy determined that every Melosian man of fighting age should be put to death – and they were. In a more famous example of that particular mob gone wrong, whipped-up denizens of Athenian democracy also demanded the arrest, trial, and execution of one of the greatest minds in history, Socrates, after accusing him of “corrupting the youth of Athens” by teaching them to think. A black mark on the system, indeed.
While I’m not particularly worried that Colorado’s caucus-goers will execute Socrates or all the men of Melos, the system is exposed to some of the same risks and tendencies of Athenian democracy: actual participation is low, by design, and the system is defined more by exclusion and selectivity than by inclusion and universality — a bad situation for any exercise of democracy.
During the Roman Republic, prior to Julius Caesar’s damning of that system into empire, and for quite a while thereafter to maintain appearances, Romans voted annually at the Campus Martius, or Mars Field. Unlike the Athenian system, the Roman system was not quite one-person-one-vote: citizens were grouped into “tribes” for the purpose of voting (determined by factors like class and location), and winners were those who won the majority of votes from the majority of tribes. Like our modern system, the Romans practiced a secret ballot; and, like both the Athenian system and our modern system, the Roman system was riddled with problems.
At its core, the Roman republican system was fundamentally corrupt: support was bought more than it was earned. Wealthy and powerful families funded drinking halls in specific neighborhoods, kept influential locals on payroll, and often bankrolled gangs of street toughs as a backup measure. Unsurprisingly in such a system, those gangs occasionally showed up on the Mars Field on election day to ensure that less-purchased citizens made what the gangs’ funders felt was the right choice. This left the system exposed not only to violence, but to the influence of the aristocrats who funded the violence.
(As a side note: almost everything we know about campaigning in the Roman political system comes from Quintus Cicero, little brother and campaign manager to the much more famous Marcus Tullius Cicero)
More so than in Athens, the Roman republican system was subject to the whims of elites and insiders, which ultimately undid it. Though our modern caucuses are theoretically open to anyone registered with the appropriate political party, the barriers to entry and participation are higher than for casting an actual ballot and, as a result, the caucus system also ends up heavily influenced by elites and insiders
Democracy has been a work in progress for more than 2,500 years, but we have learned certain things along the way, and we should apply them to our current systems.
For the obvious reasons, modern democracy should seek to distance itself as far as possible from the strongman- and mob-led earliest incarnations of the system. That’s part of why most states don’t use the antique caucus system, and why Colorado voters abandoned the state’s own caucus system in 1992. Unfortunately, it did not stay abandoned.
For the 1992 Presidential election, Colorado voters moved to a primary system, and then maintained that system for the next decade. In a 2002 ballot initiative, though, Colorado voters chose to bring the system back (or, rather, to not formally abolish it, in the complicated language of the initiative). Why? Because it was cheaper than having actual, modern elections.
That’s right: Colorado’s current caucus system exists not because it is special or functional or traditional. It exists specifically to be a cut-rate form of democracy.
In 2016, after the past caucus-primary flip-flopping had faded into history, Colorado voters chose to go back to the primary system, but left the bargain-bin caucus system intact for no apparent reason. Now, Colorado has both systems and no good excuse. The actual primary ballot, votes for which will be cast in June, will determine which party nominees proceed to the general election. The caucus system will determine who is on that ballot – except for, as mentioned above, when it doesn’t.
Caucus is not a noble tradition. It is democracy’s vestigial tail, a leftover bit of DNA from earlier, less evolved versions of the system, and there is no need for it in Colorado. At least not anymore. In addition to creating an additional hurdle for campaigns and candidates, the caucus system is cumbersome, time-consuming, and fundamentally undemocratic by virtue of its miniscule-by-design turnout.
As the United States enters only its 6th decade as a multiracial, multi-sectarian democracy, we need to continue looking forward to better systems, to improve on what we have, not to recreate what we should be glad to have already lost. We need to look forward to things like automatic voter registration, vote-by-mail, and other pro-democracy initiatives, some of which Colorado has already taken a leading position on. We need to ensure that every voice can be heard.
The caucus system does the opposite, and it’s high time we got rid of it.
