In major reform, 2020 Iowa caucuses would include absentee voting, public vote totals

WASHINGTON — Iowa’s first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential caucuses would break with decades of tradition in 2020 by allowing voters to cast absentee ballots and then releasing the raw total of votes won by each candidate.

A Democratic National Committee panel known as the Unity Reform Commission set those changes into motion during a meeting here on Saturday, clearing the way for perhaps the most significant changes to the Iowa caucuses since they emerged as a key step in the presidential nominating process five decades ago.

“There’s never been an absentee process. We’ve never released raw vote totals,” said Scott Brennan, a Des Moines attorney who serves on the DNC. “Those would seem to be pretty darn big changes.”

Reform commission members and national party leaders predicted the changes, which affect other caucus-holding states as well as Iowa, would increase voter participation, bring transparency to the nominating process and bolster grassroots activism — particularly in rural and Republican-leaning places.

At the outset of the meeting on Friday, DNC Chairman Tom Perez called the caucus reforms “game-changing.”

“Obviously we want to make sure that if you’re a shift worker you can vote in a caucus,” Perez said. “We want to make sure a member of the military or someone else who’s been left out of the process — that you can vote, that you can make sure your franchise is exercised.”

The changes represent a scaling back of some of the defining features of the Democratic caucus process, which was devised by party activists in the 1970s and differs sharply from a traditional primary and even the Republican Party of Iowa’s presidential caucuses.

The current process depends on in-person participation, as voters physically divide up based on candidate preference and must “realign” — that is, choose another candidate — if their first choice fails to meet a certain level of support at the caucus. The final results, in turn, are expressed in terms of the number of delegates each candidate would send to the party’s state convention – not the actual votes they received at the caucus.

Both of those fundamental aspects of the caucus are set to change.

The Unity Commission recommendations flatly require absentee voting and votes cast in writing.

While the Iowa Democratic Party has experimented with tele-caucuses for members of the military and voters living abroad and satellite caucus locations for participants with mobility or distance challenges, it has never offered a wide-open process for participants who don’t show up at precinct sites on caucus night. Nor has it ever measured support with ballots cast on paper.

“What that looks like, we’ll find out,” Brennan said.

The commission recommendations further demand that caucus states publicly release statewide vote counts for each candidate and create a procedure for recounting those votes in the event of a close or contested result.

During the discussion, commission members said this could aid candidates who have substantial support that nonetheless fails to meet the 15-percent viability threshold to be included in the statewide delegate count.

Commission member Jeff Weaver pointed to 2016 candidate Martin O’Malley, who campaigned heavily in Iowa and won a following but received 0.6 percent of the state delegate equivalents.

“In the Iowa caucus, you could receive 14 percent of vote in every precinct in the state and your election return would be reported as zero on caucus night,” Weaver said. “That’s unfair, particularly when we’re looking at 2020 where we’re going to have a crowded field.”

The change forces Iowa, in effect, to release at least two different results: the traditional calculation of state delegate equivalents as well as a much more straightforward tally of votes.

What remains unclear is the timing for the release of those results. Will raw vote totals be released on caucus night at the same time as the delegate figures? If not, when? How should the media and public interpret the differing results?

For now, Iowa leaders said, those questions remain unanswered, and will be worked out with in the coming months.

However substantial the changes, the commission’s moves virtually ensure that Iowa will remain first on the presidential nominating calendar and that its contest will take the form of a caucus, as it has since 1972.

“The Iowa caucuses are definitely safe, and they will continue as they have,” said Jan Bauer, a party activist from Ames who served on the commission. “The recommendations will only strengthen the caucuses.”

It also means other states may continue holding caucuses as well, although the panel issued several recommendations that favor primaries and seek to limit caucuses only to smaller and more rural states.

Many members of the commission have made clear for months their support for Iowa and caucuses generally, although many other prominent Democrats have called for limiting or abolishing caucuses as a nominating contest altogether.

While the Unity Commission’s recommendations are the most specific and prescriptive reforms yet announced for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominating process, they still represent a relatively early phase in the process.

The commission will issue a report containing the recommendations later this month. That report will be taken up by the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the full DNC, which will review and potentially tweak the proposed changes before advancing it to the full DNC for further review and a final vote.

Actually enacting the changes in Iowa and figuring out how they’ll work in practice will fall to the state party, in a manner Brennan pledged would include a wide range of stakeholders.

That process will unfold throughout 2018.

In other business, the commission moved to scale back the influence of so-called “super-delegates” — the party leaders and insiders who were not bound to support a particular presidential candidate in previous national conventions.

In a series of recommendations, the commission sharply reduced the number of super-delegates who can back a candidate regardless of how that candidate performed in their home state’s caucus or primary. The move is a response to 2016 convention delegates and particularly supporters of Bernie Sanders who believed Hillary Clinton’s nomination was unfairly bolstered by super-delegates who were unaccountable to the will of voters in their states.

If approved, only members of Congress, governors and top party leaders like former presidents would enter the national convention with no requirement to back a certain candidate on the first ballot. Two other categories of super-delegates would be required to support the candidate based on the outcome of state primary and caucus results.

The Unity Commission also outlined reforms for increasing voter access in states that hold primaries — primarily by encouraging same-day or automatic voter registration and same-day party switching for voters registered as a Republican or independent, and in some cases creating penalties for states that don’t.