Protect Our Neighborhood Elections is a campaign to educate and defend our convention/primary system of elections currently under attack by the political royalty and wealthy of Utah.
We are a nonpartisan alliance of Utahns that seek to protect our direct access to elected officials at ALL levels of government. We also seek to protect Utah’s holding of ALL elected officials accountable to individuals and not special interests and big money donors.
Utah deserves the truth and our voters deserve to have accurate information when deciding whether or not to sign this petition. CMV has yet to be completely honest or accurate in any of their information to the public. We will correct this.
For example, during their public hearings and for the last 18 months CMV has been saying that 4000 people decide elections for all of us. Here is the truth. 4000 represents only the Republican State Delegates. There are literally tens of thousands of positions throughout Utah that are up for election every 2 years. These 4000 delegates are only allowed to nominate in elections that cross county lines; so in fact very few of the hundreds of races are voted on by this group. Many State House races are left to the county delegates. County Commissioners, Sheriffs, Assessors, Clerk’s and so on are not even discussed at the GOP state convention. It is also untrue that the GOP state delegates decide all cross county races. They simply choose the Republican nominee and unless a candidate gets a very large majority at convention, the available candidates are merely whittled to 2 and all Republicans may vote in a primary. The majority winner of this primary goes on to the general election, where all non Republican candidates await them. Despite all of the claims, these 4000 people never actually decide who wins. The public does this in a general election. Naturally, CMV will argue that the GOP wins most races in Utah, but that has nothing to do with our nomination process. That has everything to do with the general electorate. Remember, right now anyone who wants to run without the endorsement of a political party may already run in a similar fashion to what CMV is proposing.
The people who advocate for this petition are very educated and very politically savvy. They represent the largest political strategy company in the state. They represent years and years of Washington politics and they represent serious ambition. They stand to ake large sums of money from this change. They know all we have laid out on just this one claim: why then deliberately mislead the people? Why ignore the county races
and the county delegates? Why ignore all other parties, including the Democrats? Why only focus on the GOP and why only the GOP statewide races? What is their real motivation? Unless the CMV backers choose to be fully honest and provide full disclosure, we should all be skeptical of their motives and their petition?
It is our goal to correct the record and ensure that all Utah voters have a real understanding of what they are signing. We do not deserve to have our political system obliterated by those who stand to gain the most from this petition, without really questioning them!
