Missouri Legislature Guts Democracy

 

by Pa Rock

Missouri Citizen Journalist

Four years ago 666,112 registered Missouri voters had a say in who the Democratic presidential candidate was.  Granted, by the time our traditionally late presidential primary rolled around on March 10, 2020, 12 of 15 candidates had already left the race and Biden won it with 60% of the vote, so we didn't't have as much say as we should have.

During the intervening four years between then and now, the Republican-controlled state legislature did away with the state's presidential primary system and said the parties could just determine who they supported at the national level however they wanted.  Missouri Republicans chose to go with a county-level caucus system which keeps many public servants, members of the military, and those with mobility, transportation, or child-care issues out of the process - and Missouri Democrats chose to have a privately-funded-and-run primary system, one which was under-publicized and in some counties almost a secret affair.

The Missouri Republican vote tally in that party's 2020 state presidential primary was 311,793.  This year's total of participants in the state's GOP county caucuses appears to be a closely guarded secret, but I was able to locate figures for two counties.  In 2020, when the GOP had an incumbent running for President, 8,183 people in Boone County (the home of MU's main campus and the city of Columbia) voted in the Republican presidential primary, and this year just 263 Boone Countians showed up for the GOP caucus - a participation rate of just over three-and-a-half percent from the very light voter turnout in 2020.

In Cole County, the home of the state's capital, Jefferson City, the GOP county caucus had just 240 participants this year, which was just over five percent of the 4,721 voters in the 2020 GOP presidential primary in that county.

Those figures show an abysmal drop in voter participation over the past four years, and, no doubt, are part of the reason that Missouri Republican officials have been reluctant to share statewide caucus figures for 2024.  Shame on them, and shame on our GOP-controlled Missouri State Legislature for hobbling democracy!

But the figures were even worse for the state's Democrats, though they did not hide their participation numbers.    19,100 registered voters participated in this year's privately-run Missouri Democratic  presidential preference primary.  Four years earlier, in 2020, (as mentioned above) 666,112 votes were cast in the state's official Democratic presidential preference primary.  This year's total number of voters was less than three percent of 2020's total.

Missouri's new system is not democracy by any stretch of the imagination.  It is politicians tightly controlling what they try to pass off to voters as democracy.

If they wanted our opinion, they would ask for it.   But don't hold your breath.