State GOP leaders, responding to the slow vote-counting process in the state Republican convention two weeks ago, will look at leasing or buying some kind of rapid vote-counting machines.
While that may sound rather unimportant, the long-term outcome could be dramatic, including fewer Republican primary elections.
"The convention went well. Most delegates were pleased," said Joe Cannon, state Republican Party chairman. "But the big problem was vote counting."
Candidates, journalists and about 1,000 of the 3,500 delegates who stuck around in the South Towne Expo Center waited more than four hours into the evening of May 8 to find out the winners in the eight-candidate governor's race.
Ultimately, Jon Huntsman Jr. received 51 percent of the final round of voting and Nolan Karras, 49 percent. They advanced to a June 22 primary election.
But if one of the men had received 60 percent of the vote, he would have won the party's nomination at the convention. And in heavily Republican Utah, becoming the majority party's nominee in a statewide race often means election in November.
Thus, how Republicans pick their candidates has a big impact on Utah and who runs it.
If GOP leaders can find a way to count ballots quickly, "We could even return to multiple ballot conventions. That would be easy" and relatively quick, said Cannon.
Changing to multiple balloting, the nomination process before the party changed to preferential balloting, also likely would change the political dynamics of such an important convention.
Even more importantly, if the party's central committee and convention delegates wanted it, there could be a final round of voting to pit the last two candidates standing and see if one candidate could get 60 percent of the vote.
That final ballot could eliminate a primary, which would mean registered Republicans who are not delegates would not get the chance to pick the GOP nominee.
In the 2002 and 2004 GOP nominating conventions, Republicans have used what's called preferential balloting, where delegates submit only one ballot on which they rank the candidates from their top choice to their last choice. The party switched to this system to save delegates time and provide full participation by all delegates who make it to the hall.
In this year's governor's race, in which delegates ranked the gubernatorial candidates one through eight, more than two-thirds of the delegates left after they deposited their ballots, which meant the convention couldn't vote on resolutions because of a lack of quorum.
Preferential balloting is liked by many delegates, said Cannon.
However, that system denies delegates options of hearing, round-by-round, who has been eliminated in the voting, and so changing their strategy as each round unfolds, notes Cannon.
Under multiple balloting, if individual ballots were filled out after each round of counting, "A Jim Hansen, for example, (who went out in the fourth round of voting May 8), could lose in one round," address the hall and ask his supporters to "cast a ballot for another specific candidate," Cannon said.
Just as important, it would give savvy delegates the chance to vote against someone, as well as vote for someone, said Cannon.
"Maybe you really don't like someone, so you put them toward the end of the preferential ballot," he said.
But under that system, if your other preferences above that person drop out, your ballot may end up giving a vote for the person you don't like much. Under a multiple ballot system, you would see the others drop out, know that, and you could then pick someone else in the final round of voting, he explained.
If ballots could be filled out with a No. 2 pencil and quickly run through a counting machine, with announcements made to the hall, and another round marked and counted, Cannon said, even a large field of eight candidates could be whittled down rather quickly — maybe even under the four hours a single preferential ballot took May 8.
As it was, in a convention-morning caucus, the Utah Education Association told GOP teacher-friendly delegates to list Gov. Olene Walker first, Karras second. And when Walker went out in the fifth round of ballot-counting, Karras picked up 273 Walker votes, 60 percent of her total. He surged ahead of candidate Fred Lampropoulos (who led Karras by just seven votes the previous round), eliminating Lampropoulos and making it into the primary with Huntsman.
"We believed we had an impact on who got out" of the convention, says Susan Kuziak, UEA executive director.
"There's no way the UEA had that many (273) delegates in the convention. Everybody takes credit for everything at these things," Cannon said.
But Cannon admits that if there was multiple balloting, delegates could see what was happening as it unfolded, and delegates could vote in the next round accordingly.
As Utah county clerks have to give up their old punch-card readers or vote scanners to make way in 2006 for federally mandated electronic voting machines, Cannon said party leaders will be looking at all kinds of options to improve vote counting at the critical Republican nominating conventions.
E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com