Bob Bernick's Notebook: Utah's Nominating System and Reforming the Electoral College

Daunting though the task may be, there does seem to be an avenue for bringing a more populist form of "democracy" to the Utah political nomination process

Interesting Bob Bernick Utah Pulse online morning column. Among other items, Bernick focuses on a recently published report from The Utah Foundation, a non-partisan public policy research organization, which "found that Utah stands alone among the 50 states in that a sitting officeholder can be removed from office by being denied his/her party’s nomination in a state or county party convention."

"In my long years as a political reporter in this state I had heard this before. But this is the first time I’ve seen the scholarly research that proves it," Bernick adds.

Noting two instances where relatively popular Utah incumbents (Olene Walker & Bob Bennett) were summarily given the old heave ho in recent GOP nominating conventions, Bernick muses about Utah’s "unique convention/primary candidate nomination process":

Still, it must be said, Utah is the only state where an incumbent – and certainly in the case of Walker, a very popular incumbent – can be removed from office by less than 3,000 state delegates. And that just does not seem right.

Click the link below to read what we'll label a "quite chewy" article:

• Bob Bernick's Notebook: Utah's Nominating System and Reforming the Electoral College

And here's the really interesting part. Bernick reports that there's now a movement afoot to alter the rules regarding the nomination process in Utah, a movement which would avoid the predictable intransigence of the Utah Legislature altogether, and bring Utah into conformity with other "caucus/primary" nomination states through a more "grass roots" oriented means:

There is a group which labels themselves “mainstream conservatives” that are considering trying to provide an alternative route to the political party primary ballots.

The group, which includes UtahPolicy owner/publisher LaVarr Webb, former Gov. Mike Leavitt, and Hinckley Institute of Politics director Kirk Jowers, among others, is thinking of running a citizen initiative petition in 2012 which would allow a party member who gathers 2 percent of the voter signatures from the last general election to put his name on the primary ballot.

That petition route is used by other convention/primary states, as found in the Utah Foundation report.

Yeah, we know that enacting legislation through Utah's constitutionally guaranteed (yet legislatively emasculated) citizens initiative process is no easy chore. Nevertheless, opponents of school vouchers used the initiative process to enact one important piece of anti-crony-capitalist citizen legislation in 2007; and Utahns for Ethical Government 1n 2010 successfully gathered the requisite number of signatures to place their own grass roots legislation on the ballot in time for the 2012 election. Daunting though the task may be, there does seem to be an avenue for bringing a more populist form of "democracy" to the Utah political nomination process.

We'll be standing by. This one will be fun to watch.

So who wants to throw in their own 2¢?