A buzz is building in some political circles to do away with state caucuses in the presidential nominating process. 

After the vote-counting messes in the Iowa, Nevada and Maine Republican caucuses, some critics say these events — largely run by untrained local party volunteers — should no longer receive recognition from the parties as legitimate elections.

In addition, the caucus votes in Minnesota and Colorado and the “beauty contest” in Missouri sparked much momentum and generated upbeat headlines for Rick Santorum, but they delivered no delegates for the former senator. The delegate selection process in those states comes later.

And then there’s Maine. In the Pine Tree State, they thought they had wrapped up their caucus results last week on Saturday, even though not everyone had the opportunity to vote.

Maine spent a week holding caucuses across that tiny state, but in Washington County the Saturday, Feb. 11, caucus was cancelled due to about four inches of snowfall.

Seriously — they simply cancelled the election, which put Mitt Romney’s 194-vote victory in Maine in question and drew howls of protest from second-place finisher Ron Paul.

Since then, the Maine Republican Party, under fire from all sides, agreed to let Washington County and another disenfranchised county vote a week later, on Saturday (as I write this, no results are in).

But the GOP leaders had no answer for several small towns that were left out of the tally that gave Romney the win. In addition, most of Waldo County was not counted, apparently due to clerical errors.

Worse yet, in some cases municipalities sending their caucus results electronically did not realize that the numbers “went to spam” in the state party’s email system.

So, the Maine Republicans had been working to save face and “reconfirm” the caucus results in the run-up to the Saturday vote in Washington County. Yet, they have also allowed some additional voting in March.

But, as in Iowa, we may never know the true outcome. That’s because the Maine GOP gave no indication when or if they will announce the state’s final results. In the meantime, the disturbing specter of Romney winning — and then losing — in Iowa and Maine looms large in the GOP nomination process.

Given all this nonsense, I have to ask why anyone would take the Maine caucuses seriously.

Charlie Webster, the besieged state GOP chairman, initially explained that Romney’s narrow margin over Paul should be viewed as a “snapshot in time” that fairly and accurately represented the state’s overall results.

Amazingly, Webster, questioned on Friday about the dysfunctional process, responded: “What difference does it make?” Wow. Time for Charlie to resign in disgrace like his Iowa colleague, state party chairman Matt Strawn.

Meanwhile, the national media has already reported that Romney won the state and regained momentum for the highest office in the land based on his 1,996 votes. To put that into perspective, last November here in Macomb County the two winning candidates for Eastpointe City Council each topped the 2,000-vote mark.

And, keep in mind, this whole messy, inaccurate process in Maine was no more than a nonbinding straw poll and is not linked to the awarding of delegates, which will come later. Maine will eventually choose 24 delegates to the national GOP convention of the 2,286 total.

The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses have traditionally escaped criticism aimed at the fact that the Hawkeye State, too, relies upon a multi-layer process to select delegates, which sometimes means the January caucus results eventually shake out as irrelevant.

But the 2012 Iowa nominating process took a beating this year after Romney was declared the winner and then a tardy attempt to legitimately count all the votes revealed two weeks later that Santorum had more votes in a “split decision.”

Embarrassed Iowa GOP officials were forced to admit that they will never know for certain who won. Results from eight precincts are missing and the party discovered inaccuracies in 131 precincts.

And in Nevada, it took two days just to count 33,000 votes, despite a 26 percent reduction in turnout from 2008. The Saturday, Feb. 4, caucus results were not certified until 1 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 6, after all the candidates and media had fled the state.

Now, let’s put that into perspective: Macomb County is split into three state Senate districts and each of the losing Senate candidates in the 2010 election received more than 33,000 votes.

I have to ask: Did the Nevada caucus overseers attend the Iowa school of vote counting?

News reports indicated that when problems became obvious on election night, the counters put all disputed ballots — from about 200 precincts — into one “trouble box” for further review.

“It’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to the party. It’s embarrassing to the state,” Jon Ralston, a Nevada political pundit who has covered Nevada politics for more than two decades, said at the time. “Ridicule has been pouring in.”

Ralston said the problems were caused by Nevada’s Republican Party being “completely incompetent.”

“Why it took so long after (the caucuses closed) is a combination of ineptitude and some troublesome precincts that they took way too long to resolve. So it’s just general incompetence.”

Wizened political pundits who’ve seen proposals for presidential election reform come and go for decades predict that any effort to eliminate state caucuses will fail, in part due to Iowa’s outsized influence in the nominating system.

But what is the alternative: a nation that relies upon “beauty contests” and “snapshots in time,” and a system plagued by missing ballots and cancelled votes to choose our president? Doesn’t that taint our November elections and our democracy?

These caucuses yield a tremendous impact on a candidate’s fortunes — press coverage, fundraising, momentum, volunteers, TV ad buys — but they demonstrate very little integrity.

I have to ask: If a rag-tag, vote-counting process that wouldn’t pass muster for a high school student council election doesn’t spark a change, what will?

 
Chad Selweski can be reached at chad.selweski@macombdaily.com.