Kaleb Poor
Staff Writer
If the Mad Hatter were to design a process for engaging in civic discourse, that process might look something like the Iowa caucuses.
If you are not familiar with the Iowa caucuses, let me acquaint you. The people of Iowa gather on one night every election year, sometimes in a church and other times at a gymnasium, to pledge their support for a candidate by grouping together and forming a huddle.
For example, supporters of Pete Buttigieg might fight for elbow room in the front pews while Bernie Sanders’s supporters pass their Juuls around out back. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren’s supporters might be reading Jane Austen in the stands while Joe Biden’s catheter army plays a sad game of 21 on the court.
Yes, the people of Iowa declare their support for presidential candidates the same way high school kids splinter off into cliques at lunch.
This may sound like a delightfully silly way of engaging in civic discourse, and it is both delightful and silly in many ways. But consider this:
How many McDonald’s are there in Des Moines, Iowa? How many Wendy’s? How many Arby’s, Taco Bells, Taco Times or Taco John’s are there in Des Moines? How many Walmarts or Targets or convenience stores? How many places of business are there in Des Moines that were open and staffed while all this played out?
Now expand that to the entire state of Iowa, population 3,146,000, give or take a few. Iowa has long been considered to have some of the most fertile soil in the world – how many of the people who work that soil did not have time to shuffle around in a gym all night? How many police officers were on duty? How many paramedics were working in ambulance bays?
The Iowa caucuses are both delightful and silly, but to call them an effective democratic process would be like getting thrown off a horse and calling it an effective means of transportation.
Huge swaths of the Iowan working class were left out of this process, and not by choice. The foundation of this process is the counting of clusters of people by hand. People were doing long division on the fly to determine the outcome of individual caucuses.
The candidates’ so-called “precinct captains” were seen haggling and horse trading over votes and gloated about it on live national television. How can we say that everyone gets to cast their own vote if we freely accept this overt corruption of the process?
We all need to have a serious talk about how we vote, and not just in Iowa. If the achievement of equal rights amongst the citizens of the United States is something we are serious about, and not just a nice sentiment to be dropped at the first sign of inconvenience, then we need to start making changes to the way we vote.
Why do we vote on a Tuesday? Better question: why do we have just one voting day? Instead of bolting to a polling place during lunch on election day, why can we not drop by a polling place during election week, whenever we have the time?
We do not have to settle for a system in which people cannot vote because they are gainfully employed.
Accept a challenge on this cold Wyoming day. Take two minutes – let us say the next two minutes, if it is convenient – and ponder the idea of voting. What would you change about how we vote, and why? What is your ideal means of making your voice heard in our democracy?
Now tell me, is getting thrown off a horse really an effective means of transportation? Is caucusing like this a sane way to go about any democratic process 100 years after the invention of the short-wave radio?
Or can we do better?
