Accuracy Matters: Primaries, Staggered Regional Voting Days & The Mainstream Media

In a column for the Globe and Mail, Rob Silver rightly points out that there is a lot of hype surrounding the Liberal Party's biennial convention. Much of that hype has resulted from the media's focus on a proposal for using a primary system to select the next leader of the party, which is a bit strange since primaries are no longer on the convention agenda. They're off the table.

Primaries were very much on the table, however, when the National Board of Directors of the Liberal Party released its Roadmap To Renewal in November. The National Board had originally proposed a series of primary votes followed by a second vote that would take place at a meeting of the Council of Presidents who would comprise an electoral college. Essentially, this proposal would have created a new form of delegated convention where the 308 presidents of the riding associations cast ballots based on the results in their riding. And if no candidate garnered a majority of the votes then the president-electors of the candidate with the poorest showing would have been free to vote for any of the remaining candidates until a winner was determined.

In December, the National Board revised their proposals including the one for selecting a leader. In this new document, there was no call for the creation of a Council of Presidents electoral college. (Perhaps a few bloggers had something to do with this change of heart, who knows -- here, here, here and here.) The new proposal for selecting a leader was then formulated as a series of amendments to the party's constitution.

Once the Council of Presidents electoral college was gone, once there was no longer a second distinctly different type of vote at the end of the campaign, such as a delegated convention or a run-off vote, the word "primary" ceased to be an accurate description of the proposal.

If the mainstream media continues to use the term "primary," it may have a normalizing effect on the proposal in the minds of delegates to the biennial convention and the public at large. People will think that the proposal is similar to what exists in other political parties they're familiar with, particularly the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States. But the fact is that the National Board's proposal is unprecedented for a Western democratic political party, primarily because it's inherently undemocratic.

The National Board accurately refers to their proposal as "staggered regional voting days". And that's what it is: voters will cast a FINAL DIRECT VOTE for a new leader using a preferential ballot staggered over a 70 day period -- roughly the second half of a 21 week campaign. The people who vote in the middle of the campaign will base their choice on a very different set of facts compared to those who vote at the end.* That's unequal and unfair. Consequently, using the word "primary," in this case, is tantamount to a euphemism for a proposal that is truly indefensible.

The National Board's desire to use staggered regional voting days as red meat for the media beast is brazenly stated in the introduction to the amendments. There's no pretence about it. But political reporters may want to pursue another story and contact their sources in academia to get their take on this proposal. They may be shocked by the responses.

And that's no hype.

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*Think back to the 2006 Liberal leadership campaign, if you doubt the validity of this statement.

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Staggered Primaries(?): Unprecedented And Undemocratic