Straw Polls – Is There A Better Way?
This last weekend over 2,000 GOP activists gathered on Michigan’s historic Mackinac Island for 3 days of speeches, receptions, workshops, dinners, and seminars sponsored by the Michigan Republican Party. This was a terrific event which featured both state and national Republican and media luminaries including John Engler, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Eric Cantor, Charlie Crist, Air Fleisher, and John Fund.
The event also included a Straw Poll asking conference attendees their preferences for Governor and other state offices. The Michigan GOP is to be commended for running a first rate “election” where you needed a Michigan ID and $100 registration fee to vote. Despite some scattered reports of childish behavior on the part of some campaigns, the voting seemed to run nearly flawlessly and fairly.
However, we are now left with the feeling that all this work doesn’t really mean much. The winners get a small, momentary bump and the losers work to discount the results – but do they matter and more importantly should they matter?
If they do matter, can we do anything to make them more reflective of true support? Do straw polls do anything to help candidates in the general election or the primary? Does it mean anything if one campaign decides to spend $260 for every straw vote; while other campaigns spend almost nothing? Would all that time, money and effort been spent on the 600,000 voters in Michigan who will vote in the next GOP primary or the 4 million people who will vote in the general election?
Clearly straw polls help raise money for sponsors and create interest in the races for grassroots activists, but could we do more to make the voting more meaningful and more insightful? Should we allow campaigns to bus in supporters? Should we allow campaigns to pay for their registration fees? Should we require registration fees or should travelling hundreds of miles to a tiny island in the middle of Straits of Mackinac (or to a sweltering campus in the middle of Iowa) be enough to secure the right to vote?
Most interesting to me is whether there are there better voting methods to use than single vote winner take all ballots? Should we explore preferential voting systems and Borda counting methods where each voter ranks each candidate in order of preference, instead of having them make just once choice – would that make the results more meaningful? Wouldn’t that blunt the impact of paying for straw votes?
Let us know what you think.
- Michael Meyers
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