Are state governments, in states that hold a caucus, required to provide audit trails on how all the delegates vote at each subsequent level of the process??
For example, the following is quoted from Wikipedia on the Iowa caucus:
“Delegates from the precinct caucuses go on to the county conventions, which choose delegates to the district conventions, which in turn selects delegates to the Iowa State Convention. Thus it is the Republican Iowa State Convention, not the precinct caucuses, which select the ultimate delegates to the Republican National Convention in Iowa. All delegates are officially unbound from the results of the precinct caucus, although media organizations either estimate delegate numbers by estimating county convention results or simply divide them proportionally.”
So if delegates are “officially unbound” to the precinct vote, I’m curious to know how often they go against their precinct votes. Anyone aware of any good sources of information on this subject?
No. State parties, not state governments, run caucuses.
Good question, and a difficult one to answer because so many candidates withdraw between the caucus and the subsequent stages of delegate selection. In the last three election cycles, every candidate except one (in each party) has withdrawn by late February or early March, making the later rounds of delegate selection entirely moot.
In earlier election cycles, you had contests such as Ford-Reagan, Mondale-Hart-Jackson, and Clinton-Brown in which the losing candidate(s) remained active all the way to the national convention. I’m not aware of any study from those elections as to how faithfully county and state delegates maintained their pledges. My guess is “pretty faithfully”, partly because anyone gung-ho enough to get elected as a county delegate is probably dedicated to their candidate, and partly because I have a feeling we would hear about it if there were widespread defections. But again, I know of no systematic information on this score.
Here in Minnesota, the precinct caucus votes are binding. The total results from all over the state determine how many delegates each candidate gets.
But those delegates are selected later, at the State Convention in June. (It will likely all be decided by then.) So my precinct, 12-08, could vote for Hillary at the caucus, but then I go to the State Convention and get elected as an Obama delegate to the National Convention. No conflict there. The caucus votes (in total) determine how many delegates each candidate gets, but an individual who becomes a national delegate is not required to support the candidate that won in his neighborhood caucus.
The votes of each precinct are reported to the Secretary of State, presumably they will be reported online, so you can see how each precinct voted. But it doesn’t mean much for delegates, since they aren’t tied to specific caucuses.
‘Unfaithfullness’ on the part of delegates is retained in the memory of the participants, however. There is a woman in my district who was a delegate with me at the 1982 State Convention, who was elected from a subcaucus supporting a specific candidate, but who continually voted for a different candidate at the State Convention. Many of us remember that each time we go to select delegates for this years Convention.