Our Voice: Why your vote (really doesn’t) count

As Republicans gather in Pasco this week for their state convention, we applaud their decision to listen to the will of the people.

Unlike our state’s Democratic party, 100 percent of the delegates selected by the Washington State Republican Party this weekend will represent the candidate chosen by voters in our state’s presidential primary May 24. Democrats decided who their delegates would represent through caucuses held months ago.

In short, if you’re voting for a Democrat in the primary, your vote doesn’t matter.

But that’s not the only flaw with our state’s presidential primary. By holding the primary so late in the campaign season, it doesn’t have much of an impact at all. With only one candidate still active in the race, who the Republican nominee has all but been decided already.

Another problem with the primary is that voters in Washington must declare their party affiliation along with their vote. That becomes public record. And that creates a whole pool of folks for the parties to target with their propaganda and fundraising solicitations during this — and future — elections.

If you’re a Republican, your vote will count May 24 — but not for much. Despite the party’s willingness to let you determine the delegate allocation, and the fact that the ballot lists four candidates, Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee. Because our state’s primary is so late in the process, it’s unlikely the banquet featuring a presidential candidate, listed on the state convention agenda for May 20 in Pasco, will indeed feature one.

If you’re a Democrat, your party has already chosen Bernie Sanders. You can vote, but nobody cares who you vote for.

And if you’re a voter who likes the freedom to choose the best candidates regardless of party affiliation, and you want to vote in the presidential primary, you must declare yourself as either a Democrat or Republican. You must also declare that you won’t participate in the caucus or convention of any other party for the presidential election.

So if you were a disgusted Democrat after participating in the March caucuses, and were looking to make a change by voting for a Republican candidate in May, you can’t do that either.

Secretary of State Kim Wyman proposed moving the primary to March, but that was shot down by Democrats in the Legislature. March makes a lot more sense, and Wyman’s proposed date was just after Super Tuesday. Multiple candidates are usually still active; by May, most of them have seen the writing on the wall and dropped out. It would have made Washington more a part of the action, instead of a state rubber-stamping foregone conclusions for presidential candidates in late May.

As the elected head of our state elections department, Wyman is encouraging people to vote in the presidential primary. The primary is an official state election, and “What the Republican and Democratic state parties do with those results is up to their state and national committees,” Wyman wrote recently in the Tacoma News Tribune.

Wyman also took a bit of a veiled dig at the state of the current system: “We expect a robust turnout, historically 10 times that of the caucuses. This way of voting is familiar, fair, secure and inclusive of the broad electorate. Increasingly, primaries are the preferred system in America for allocating convention delegates. Our hope is that both parties will use the primary results in 2020, early in the election cycle, and listen to the feedback provided by voters this year,” she wrote.

Voting is an important and vital function of our democracy — in most instances and we aren’t encouraging you not to vote. But should you choose to vote, you should understand what that vote really means as opposed to what it should and could mean.

You, the taxpayer, are paying $11.5 million to hold a presidential primary that for one party is nothing more than a way to update their fundraising list, and for the other, an exercise with little or no practical purpose.

It could be argued that the parties are using taxpayer dollars and resources for political purposes, under the guise of conducting a democratic process. Under normal circumstances, that’s illegal.

We have four years, before the next presidential primary, to get it fixed. That’s plenty of time for the rightfully incensed voter to forget. The Legislature should follow Wyman’s advice and fix it this next session.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 4:44 PM with the headline "Our Voice: Why your vote (really doesn’t) count."