New election rules?

i-710d005c8660d36282911838843a792d-ClockWeb logo2.JPG
Some ideas from two years ago (August 26, 2004):

---------------------------------------------------------
I posted this on www.jregrassroots.org and on the One America Committee blog (formerly JRE campaign blog) on March 06, 2004:

Primaries: Most small parties do not have primaries. They decide their nominees at Conventions or in smokey backrooms. No TV for them. One of the big parties usually has an incumbent President or VP who is a de facto nominee. Even if that party has a primary, it is of no importance, thus no TV.

Those parties that have competitive primaries need to set a date for announcements, and need to submit the full lists of valid candidates to the media by a certain date. Thus LaRouche, sorry, no TV. Independents, sorry, join or form a party or no TV.

While the candidates are free to traverse the country, give interviews if invited, buy ads in newspapers etc whenever they want, there is only a limited TV season just preceding the primaries. That season starts a few weeks before the first primary and lasts through the last primary. There is a complete media blackout starting at midnight prior to primaries, ending at the time when all votes have been counted.

Democratic Party: Primaries are held all on the same day, or, there is a set of 10 primaries, five states each, two weeks apart. At each date, one of the states is NE, one is SE, one is SW, one is MW, one is W. (e.g., first date: IA, NH, SC, NM, WA, two weeks later MO, VT, NC, AZ, OR, etc.). At least one TV debate between each two dates. No endorsements allowed until the season is over. No superdelegates. All primaries open, or all states forced to allow change of party affiliation on the spot. Similar rules for primaries in local and statewide elections, with local TV stations.

General election:
The nominee of each party has equal TV time. Those are public airwaves and not businesses - they better give us back what we gave them. Local stattions similarly cover local races. The TV season lasts for 4 weeks prior to the election. Total media blackout starting at midnight prior to election, ending once all the votes have been counted.

In general (both primaries and the general election):
No electronic voting. Pull the lever, check your ballot, keep the receipt. Recounts made very easy to trigger by narrow margins, complaints, etc. No polls published prior to any vote - they are for internal use of campaigns only. Exit polls may be analyzed publicly the day after the vote. No candidate can accept any donation from any ORGANIZATION, just individuals who are NOT at the time registered as Washington lobbyists. Limit of $2000 seems right.

Think these through. What unintended consequences did I miss? Any other ideas?

Tags

More like this

As you know, I’ve been running a model to predict the outcomes of upcoming Democratic Primary contests. The model has change over time, as described below, but has always been pretty accurate. Here, I present the final, last, ultimate version of the model, covering the final contests coming up in…
Today and tomorrow we have the Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington Democratic primaries. According to the model I developed prior to the last primary, which predicts future primaries using information about primaries to date (which I've not updated from last Tuesday), Sanders will win all three…
There is some discussion about Bernie Sanders' strategy for winning the nomination despite being significantly behind in the pledged delegate count. Most of this discussion is nearly worthless because those engaged in it (talking and listening) are, or seem, poorly informed about how the system…
What is the relationship between what happens in these two early primary races and what actually happens later on in the election cycle? It turns out that this is a difficult question to answer. One very simple way of asking the question is this: Does the winner of a given contest also become…

Much as I like the basic plan, it won't happen. The media now earn north of $1B in political advertising revenue for a major election. They won't give that up without a huge fight.
I like the idea of spreading the primaries, currently the few places with early primaries get way to much clout, (i.e. their local issues get more promises than other states).
We saw in 04, an awful effect of the electoral college. Only those states that the polls showed to be close mattered. I'm in a large state whose outcome was pretty much assured, no candidate would pander to our interests (I'm not saying thats a bad thing), but there was obvious pandering to swing states voters.