Welcome
Thank you for your continued service to the Utah Republican Party (UTGOP) in your capacity as a state delegate! In these difficult times, this kind of service is more important than ever to help preserve our great state and republic. Please feel free to browse this area to learn more about your duties and the upcoming April 23rd, 2022 UTGOP Nominating Convention and to learn more about 1st Congressional Candidate Doug Durbano in the other areas of this website and at his FaceBook page.
Delegate Duties
Convention Timeline
The UTGOP governing documents say what things need to happen and the UTGOP Chairman and State Central Committee get to say when they happen. The UTGOP website will eventually have all the important calendar dates, but for now, here is a pretty good guide of what you can expect (to be updated as the information becomes available from the UTGOP):
- The convention notice (the Call to Convention) will be emailed to the delegates around April 10th. This mailing contains lots of convention information and a PIN that will allow you to register (credential) to vote using an online voting system (VOATZ) that has already been used in Utah County so there is a high level of confidence in it.
- Over the next few days, there will probably be some opportunities to pre-register. Jump on that if you can to beat the rush.
- The delegates will start receiving their delegate guides by April 17th.
- Starting April 18th, the delegates will use their PIN to register online by phone or PC using VOATZ. The state party will continue to contact delegates who have not registered to get them to register until the registering/credentialing process has been completed by early April 23rd when balloting opens.
- Balloting will begin early Thursday, April 23rd and go to Saturday April 25th. The regularly scheduled convention was April 25th anyway, so the timing to start voting after the credentialing works out, luckily, to be right about then.
- Balloting will probably end in the afternoon of April 25th and, because we are using electronic voting, the election results should be available later that same day.
- At that point, candidates who have gathered signatures really don’t care what the results are. They didn’t need any delegate votes and are going to the primary no matter what. However, candidates like Doug Durbano, who did not elect to gather over 7000 signatures at $10 a pop, only make it to the primary with the support of the delegates. He is the only 1st Congressional District Candidate who has been running as a convention-only candidate since January to support the Caucus/Convention system and he needs your help here.
This IRV guide is being provided to help the delegates better understand Instant Runoff Voting before they use it as they vote in the 2020 UTGOP Nominating Convention.
What is IRV?
Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), also known as Preferential Voting, is a form of voting where you vote for all, or some of the candidates in a race in the order you prefer them.
For example, pretend you have five candidates on the ballot, in this order: Smith, Jones, Brown, Andrews and Olsen. You really like Brown, sort of like Jones, somewhat like Andrews, dislike Smith and really dislike Olsen. You could then number the candidates this way:
4. Smith
2. Jones
1. Brown
3. Andrews
5. Olsen
It’s just that simple! Of course, you could just vote for the candidates you like too, but that might not be what you really want to do (explained below).
Roberts Rules of Order (a common go-to resource for various methods of balloting) says to almost never use IRV. However, the situation we find ourselves in with the coronavirus and everyone voting remotely is actually the one exception to that rule they are very happy with. Whew!
You should only vote for the candidates you know about because when IRV is being tabulated, the eliminated candidates people vote for, which could be random choices if they are just checking boxes for candidates they don’t know, could determine the final winner. That’s not good!
But, only voting for a few candidates may make your ballot not count because the type of IRV tabulation we use discards a ballot once the choices have all been eliminated so it doesn’t count in the totals used to determine a majority. Counting eliminated ballots in the total could possibly result in a non-majority winner (which goes against our governing documents). In that case it’s like you never voted. That’s not good either!
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO:
So, the best thing you can do with IRV is to thoroughly research ALL the candidates enough to make an informed vote on each one so we don’t get a random winner and so your vote is counted. That’s good!
And one last thing, first place is of course the most important vote in IRV balloting, and Doug understands that some of you may have a different favorite candidate you want for your first IRV choice. In that (hopefully rare!) case, he would very much appreciate your second-place vote on your IRV ballot. In Horse racing, there is “Win”, “Place”, and “Show”. In this Horse race, if Doug can’t have your “Win” vote, he would sure love to have your “Place” vote!
The bottom line, if a candidate got onto the ballot using the “signature route”, then they don’t need delegate votes… they are already on the ballot. Since Doug followed the Republican bylaws and elected to go Convention-only in order to let the delegates do the vetting, he DOES need delegate votes!
