Bob Bernick, Utah Policy Contributing Editor

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A group of Utahns, including LaVarr Webb, the owner and publisher of UtahPolicy.com, have decided not to run a citizen initiative in 2012 that could have provided an alternative route for a candidate to his party’s primary ballot.

I can certainly understand the hesitancy to undertake such a huge and expensive effort.

Over several years the Legislature – usually with the majority Republicans pushing the bills – have made it more and more difficult to gather the required number of voter signatures to get an initiative on the general election ballot.

The last bill said the number of signatures in the petition formula must be based on a presidential election. Since more Utahns vote in presidential elections than in off-year elections, that would increase the signatures that must be gathered.

In any case, Webb and Kirk Jowers, head of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics, told the Salt Lake Tribune that it would just be too difficult to run a citizen petition in 2012. But the effort could be mounted in 2014 or beyond.

The group’s concern is reflected in a Utah Foundation study, that will be discussed in a special forum at noon today, which shows that by and large party delegates in Utah are more extreme in their political views than the respective party’s rank-and-file voters.

In the case of Democrats, their county and state delegates are more liberal than most Utah Democrats, in the case of Republicans, their delegates are more conservative.

To be candid, it doesn’t matter much that Democratic delegates are more liberal.

That’s because Democrats are by far the minority party in the state. It’s Republicans who run most of the local governments here. And Republicans certainly run state government.

So, naturally, folks who are worried about political balance in the state point to the county and state GOP conventions as places where right-leaning candidates are advanced, moderates eliminated.

And since Utah is so overwhelmingly Republican in its voting patterns, in many cases the GOP nominee is nearly automatically elected in the general election. The Democrats, even if they have a candidate on the ballot, have no real chance of winning.

Thus, the “reformers,” if I can call them that, rightfully argue that the real elections are taking place either in the county or state Republican conventions, or in the closed GOP primary.

One of the group’s arguments is that it is always better, in a Democracy, to have a larger number of voters deciding a race than a smaller number.

To address their concerns, the group’s petition would have allowed – through law – a candidate to bypass the caucus/convention process and, if he could get the required number of voter signatures on a petition, get on his party’s primary ballot via that petition.

Several other states use this system, including Connecticut.

As you may imagine, GOP leaders and a number of officeholders who were elected via the current system, took a dim view of the group’s efforts.

In the end, said Webb and Jowers, there wasn’t enough time, money and organization to push the alternative ballot route in 2012.

But there are political reasons also.

I’ve been told that there is sympathy among some GOP lawmakers and party stalwarts over the group’s concerns.

And perhaps a better strategy, at least for now, is to see if delegates and party leaders themselves won’t address the issue.

The obvious way would be to change the current convention nominating process. That would have to be done within the party structure itself.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have, in their conventions, what’s called the “60 percent rule.”

If any candidate gets 60 percent of his delegate vote in any round of voting, he is automatically nominated for that office.

If no candidate gets 60 percent, then the top two vote-getters advance to a primary.

In the case of Republicans, that is a closed primary. Only a registered Republican can get a ballot – although an independent voter can sign up to be a Republican on Election Day.

Democrats hold an open primary, any registered voter can get a Democratic ballot.

The 60 percent nomination level could, by a vote of convention delegates, be raised to, say, 70 percent.

That would likely mean more primary elections.

Or – as is the case in some other states – if in any round of convention voting a candidate got 20 percent of the delegate vote, he would go on the primary ballot.

That, too, would lead to more primary elections.

And more primary elections would, the reformers argues, mean more regular party voters would get a chance to pick the ultimate party nominee.

So, maybe it would be good to see if party delegates will open up their candidate nominating system in 2012 or 2013. If they don’t, says Jowers, then maybe in 2014 the group could run a citizen initiative petition.

I don’t know if an alternative route to a party’s primary ballot is the best solution.

But something clearly does have to change.

And while there are probably many examples of citizens’ will being subverted by a narrow delegate base, I’ll give just one.

In 2003 then-Gov. Mike Leavitt (who is also in the “reformer” group) resigned his office to join the George W. Bush administration.

Lt. Gov. Olene Walker became governor. She was clearly a moderate.

Walker ended up leading the state for around 18 months. She had high job approval ratings.

In fact, just before she left office the end of 2004, her job approval rating was in the 90^th percentile – very good.

But Walker wasn’t a member of her party’s right wing.

While she ran for election in 2004, she finished in the middle of the pack in that spring’s state GOP convention, and so was eliminated.

If Walker had been on the final November ballot, there is little doubt in my mind that she would have won. But she never got close to that ballot.

The conservatives in the 2004 convention got rid of her.

Now, I’ll admit, that convention advanced future Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and former House Speaker Nolan Karras to a primary (where Huntsman won).

Huntsman went on to be very popular, and is considered to this day a moderate Republican – certainly compared to some of the right-wingers he faces in the current 2012 U.S. presidential field.

But the fact remains, Utahns didn’t get a chance to vote on Walker. Just like they didn’t get a chance to vote on former U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett, who was ousted from office in the 2010 GOP state convention.

And I think that is wrong, pure and simple.

Utahns elected Bennett to office. They should have had some say in his removal.

We certainly liked the job Walker was doing as governor, even if we only elected her as lieutenant governor.

We should have had the chance to vote on her, as well.

The alternative route initiative would have given the voters at least that chance – should either Walker or Bennett have picked the petition route rather than the caucus/convention route to the GOP primary ballot.

I don’t like the fact that a couple of hundred state delegates can make such critical public decisions for millions of Utahns.

Now we’ll see if county and state GOP delegates reform their caucus/convention nominating system on their own.

Frankly, I doubt they will. Since they would in effect be dis-empowering themselves – and that runs against basic human nature.

So, I think we may be hearing more from Leavitt-Webb-Jowers et al. in two years time.