The political and business leaders behind the Count My Vote initiative are powering up for another run at changing the way Utah politics works. This time, they really mean it.
And we should hope they succeed.
The group filed its initial paperwork with the state election office the other day. Next is the drive to gather more than 113,000 signatures of Utah voters and, if that happens, the voters of the state will decide the matter at the polls in 2018.
The goal, as it was when the same group launched a similar effort in 2014, is to eliminate the caucus and convention system the state’s various political parties use to choose their nominees for county, state and federal office and replace it with a much more open primary election system.
The larger goal is to have a political culture where a great many more people have a say in who their representatives are. And that would be an unalloyed good for the state even if the related hope of pulling the Legislature away from the far right and toward the true center of Utah political views doesn’t necessary follow.
There is little question that the kinds of debates and legislation we see on Utah’s Capitol Hill are not what would be going on if the system that nominated lawmakers was not so dominated by a few true believers. Decisions involving education, health care, public lands, guns and other important and emotional issues would likely still tend to the conservative side of the scale, but not to the anti-teacher, anti-public land and super-small government extreme we see now.
County My Vote’s leaders include former Gov. Mike Leavitt, R, Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams, D, and business leader Gail Miller, NBA.
They pulled back on what would likely have been a successful initiative two years ago when members of the Legislature offered a compromise, a compromise that became a measure called SB54. That law preserved the caucus/convention system and added the petition method favored by CMV as an alternative path to each party’s primary ballot.
But there were problems. For one thing, the number of signatures required by SB54 to get on primary ballots in state legislative races was far too high to be practical. For another, the leadership of the Utah Republican Party never bought into the SB54 pact and have been working to overturn it, either in the Legislature or in the courts.
The GOP’s argument that the party, not the state, gets to decide how candidates are chosen for either primaries or a party’s nomination remains before a federal appeals court. If the party wins, all this talk of making politics a bigger tent in Utah will be over.
And that matters because, when we live in what is basically a one-party state, how that party chooses its candidates affects all of us.
But it will be many months before we know what the courts say. In the meantime, Count My Vote petitions are coming to a streetcorner or mall near you. It’s the best chance you are likely to have to wrest the political power in Utah away from a self-selected few and bring it back to the people as a whole.