JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – For decades, Missouri voters have gone to the polls to vote in a presidential preference primary. But not anymore.
If you were a Missouri voter in 2020, right before the start of the pandemic, you might remember heading to the holes to vote for your favorite candidate in the presidential preference primary. Last year, the General Assembly voted to do away with it. The state’s top election official says that election was only for show anyway.
“What has changed is we are no longer misleading people to tell them, that if they vote in the primary, they will get to select the presidential nominee,” Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft said. “We’ve subsequently always had the primary and the caucus, but the caucus has actually made the determination about who would receive the votes from Missouri to be president.”
Instead of heading to the polls every four years to vote in a primary race, caucuses get to decide how delegates are awarded.
“Unless that primary determines who the delegates are, there’s really a disconnect between the will of the people and their votes and actually making the decision for president,” Ashcroft said.
Ashcroft said there’s actually nothing new in the process, because even with a primary, caucuses have been making these decisions for years.
“What really has been is happening, is we’ve had a primary where the voters have voted and then the parties have actually gone and decided who the delegates would be and there was no legal requirement that the people’s votes make the difference as to who the delegates are,” Ashcroft said.
This past session, some lawmakers tried to reinstate the presidential preference primary for next year, but the proposal failed.
“What we’ve said is you should have one of them. And if you’re going to have a primary, you need to do it in such a way that when the people that determines who will get the delegates or the votes from the state of Missouri in the nomination,” Ashcroft said.
In a caucus, members of each political party meet and divide into groups according to which candidate they want to win then the number of votes in each group decides how many delegates each candidate they want to win. Then, the number of votes in each group decides how many delegates each candidate wins.
“It is a very free speech, free-for-all, with the wheeling and dealing,” Ashcroft said. “It takes a long time, but in some respects, you can claim it’s one of the purist forms of democracy there is.”
Both the chairs of the Missouri Republican Party and Democratic Party have said they are in the favor of reinstating the primary.
Caucuses will be held next summer, but Ashcroft says preparations have already started.