I’ve been watching some political blogs today and a poster mentioned that Washington state will have both a (Dem) primary and a (Dem) caucus, but only the caucus will count.
What’s that about? Isn’t that likely to confuse an awful lot of people who think their vote in the primary is the real thing and therefore won’t caucus? Who thought this up?
Yes. The Washington State primaries have been in limbo in the past decade. Here’s a link…
As for why a primary is still HELD I can’t say.
Because the Republicans honor its results. They select half of their delegates based on the primary preference vote and half by caucus. The Dems select all by caucus.
Here we see yet again the intersection between state political parties and state legislatures which causes so much confusion. The legislature can schedule a presidential primary, but it can’t force both state parties (or the national parties) to use it.
Washington Democrats have always distrusted the presidential primary, because Washington doesn’t allow partisan registration and allows the voter choice of party ballot selection to remain confidential after the fact. There is no way to know whether non-Democrats are dominating the primary. (This is true in other states as well, but other state parties don’t seem to care.)
So Washington will have its primary, but Democrats will ignore it and caucus a week before. Washington will also have a non-presidential primary, to nominate candidates for other offices, in September, and the parties have no choice but to use it, because it determines who appears on the November general election ballot.
It confused me. I’m a relative newcomer to Washington State, so I dutifully mailed off my ballot on Tuesday thinking I was ahead of the game. I just happened to hear on KPLU (local NPR station) on the way to work that my vote wouldn’t count. I called the Democratic Party in my county yesterday ant this is what I was told:
The State of Washington voted to have primaries. However it’s the Democratic Party who allocates the delegates. They decided to award all of the delegates to the winner of the caucus and disregard the primary results. So casting a vote in the Washington State Primary will not count. The only way for your vote to count in this primary election is to attend a caucus. The DP guy said that the results of the primary balloting would be released to the media because ‘people vote in herds’ and can be used to boost the ratings of the winner.
Of the five people (not including me) in my immediate office area, four did not know that their ballots would not count.
Wasn’t there a problem up there that a bunch of ballots were tossed anyway since voters did not mark a party preference on the ballot?
Yep.
As the article suggests, this may be in large part due to the voters forgetting to sign the oath; but I have a sneaking suspicion that a fair number are ignoring the oath in protest of having to declare themselves to be a Demoncrat or Repuglican, if only for the one election.
(For those not aware, the SoW used to have a “blanket primary” where one could select candidates regardless of party affiliation. As long as we hid up here in the corner, we got away with it; but when California tried a similar ploy, the national parties woke up and sued to have the practice ruled unconstitutional because it violated their right of free association. And once it was unconstitutional there, we lost it here. Thanks, CA.)