If you want your voice to be heard in this year's election, Tuesday night is your best -- and possibly only -- opportunity.

In neighborhoods throughout the state, Republicans and Democrats will conduct caucus meetings to elect delegates to state and county party conventions. It may not seem like a big deal to the average person, but this is where the political stakes are the highest in Utah. An individual voter wields far more power at a caucus meeting than in an election.

Convention delegates do more than just set the party's platform, although that is an important duty. They also vote for their party's nominees. A primary election takes place only if a candidate fails to get 60 percent of the delegate vote at the convention.

Unfortunately, the caucus system is easy to manipulate. A special-interest group can easily take advantage of voter apathy (in this case, lack of attendance) and stack the meetings to elect delegates friendly to their special causes. Delegates installed this way may not represent the mainstream and actually take candidates out of consideration who may have had a broader appeal with voters or who were less beholden to a particular party faction.

Moderate Republicans, for example, have complained that the ultraconservative fringe of the party has stacked the deck in caucuses for years, hijacking the GOP and alienating mainstream party members by pushing hard-line positions -- calling for the United States to leave the United Nations and "excommunicating" any Republican who endorses any non-Republican candidate.

The ideal way to fight this is to scrap the caucus system and go straight to primary elections. That rankles party strategists who would rather avoid the cost, both financial and political. But it would give voters at large a real chance to pick the candidates.

This is an issue the Legislature needs to take up at its next session. Meanwhile, the best solution is for more people to make an effort to attend the caucus meetings and question the people seeking seats as delegates.

Not only do you need to know where potential delegates stand on the issues and which candidates they support at all levels, you also need to know (in the case of the Republican convention) who is the second choice for each position. The GOP uses an instant runoff system at the convention. If no candidate gets 60 percent of the first ballot, the one with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and the second-choice votes are tallied up. The process is repeated until either one candidate garners 60 percent or the field is whittled down to two for a primary runoff.

Theoretically, a candidate may not be in first place initially but could come out on top if he or she is the second choice of enough delegates.

The system has merit in that some delegates may leave after casting their ballots, reducing the pool of delegates to the point where the candidate with the most persistent delegates wins. With an instant runoff, everyone votes only one time and the winning candidate truly represents the will of the convention. But that's a weak argument for maintaining a caucus system that is fundamentally flawed, as we've got right now.

Caucuses will be convened Tuesday night. For the system to work, all voters need to attend their caucus meetings and vote for delegates.

Be there.

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TO FIND YOUR CAUCUS MEETING

Democrat: www.utdemocrats.org

Republican: www.utahgop.org

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A5.