April 22--OK, OK, we get it. Political parties are private organizations. They make their own rules for how they nominate candidates -- how they select delegates to conventions and what those delegates may do.
Party leaders have been reminding the public of this central fact repeatedly in recent weeks as delegate controversies have arisen in unusually close Democratic and Republican presidential contests.
Every state, it seems, either has a different formula for translating primary vote totals into delegates or a different delegate-selection scheme at its caucuses. The addition to the mix of uncommitted delegates or those bound to former candidates results in enough complications and potential intrigues to keep pundits chattering nonstop about various paths to victory.
We're not often confronted with this reality. Most presidential nominations in the past several decades have been decided without seriously threatening the illusion of direct democracy that undergirds the process. The candidates with the most votes surge into dominant positions by late spring and the conventions are tedious ratifications of the will of the electorate.
So some have been shocked, even outraged, this year to learn that the candidate who gets the most votes in what appears to be one long election broken up into weekly segments isn't necessarily going to be the nominee.
I'm thinking mostly of Republican Donald Trump, the bloviating entrepreneur and leading primary vote-getter who seems likely to be a few delegates short of the 50 percent threshold when he arrives at the GOP convention in July. Horrified party regulars are hoping to exploit wrinkles in the rules to deprive him of the nomination.
But it also remains at least mathematically possible that Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont will be leading the Democratic presidential nomination contest by certain metrics yet lose at the convention to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Yet even if neither of these party-splintering events occur, we've all received a bracing reminder: Primary contests may resemble conventional public elections in nearly every way -- down to the polling places and the neighbors serving as judges -- but they are, in fact, private functions. Technically they're selections, not elections.
They're a means by which political organizations take the pulse of their supporters in an effort to put forth their best candidates. These organizations are free to do what they like with the results both locally and in the aggregate and take their chances that voters will go along.
Fine.
Just don't make the public pay for it.
Running these massive election-like functions costs big bucks. How much? I asked a spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections what our March 15 primary cost taxpayers and he said he had no idea, that the best way to find out would be to ask officials in all 102 counties for a dollar figure, then add up their responses.
I didn't have time to do that, but here's what I did find:
In 2008, estimates in news stories put the cost of a special statewide primary and general election to fill President-elect Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat as high as $50 million, though those elections weren't necessary. In 2012, ABC News reported that state elections officials projected the cost of a special primary in just one of Illinois' U.S. Congressional districts at $2.58 million, which, when multiplied by our 18 congressional districts is a little more than $46 million.
