Get Herald RSSEven in the wake of the Electoral College's colossal failure in 2000, it seems that Americans have resigned themselves to that quirky institution through which they filter votes when selecting a president. After all, the Founding Fathers themselves came up with it! It couldn't possibly be a bunch of useless nonsense. Either way, by partially democratizing the Electoral College we have ensured that diversions from the popular will are rare and, since a repeat of 2000 is incredibly unlikely, the College is not hugely detrimental to democracy in America.
The primaries, on the other hand, are seriously problematic. I know that a good many of you readers are tired of hearing about the primaries; they have been going on for two months, and the run-up to them lasted God knows how long. You can't open the paper or watch the news without seeing something about Obama, Clinton or McCain. Well to tell the truth, I'm sick and tired of it all as well. The presidential primaries should be completely rethought.
The first problem is that the delegate selection process is so drawn out. Every year the primaries move earlier, and yet the conventions stay put in summer and early fall. This election dutifully followed the trend: The first vote to determine the candidates in the November 2008 election took place on Jan. 3 in Iowa - a full 307 days before the actual election and 153 days before the last state has its say. Petty squabbles over who is allowed to vote early and who is not led to the disenfranchisement of Democrats in Florida and Michigan (states that account for nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population) and led the Republican party to penalize offending states by halving their delegations.
Honestly, what is so difficult about having everyone vote on the same day? All Americans vote in unison in the general election because any other situation would give undemocratic, unfair and undue weight to one set of voters over another. It shouldn't be different when we're narrowing down the candidates. In previous elections, many voters expressed frustration with their options in November and ended up selecting the lesser of two evils. And no wonder they are dissatisfied with the results - even in this unusually competitive contest, all but five candidates had already been eliminated before Super Tuesday by voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina (which account for 3.6 percent of America's population). In addition to favoring early voting states, the primary system also heavily dilutes the votes of the more populous states. In the Democratic primary, Wyoming has 3.5 times as many delegates per resident as Texas, and Vermont has three times as many delegates per resident as California. Furthermore, Rhode Island, Montana and Delaware also make out like bandits when compared with New York, Illinois and Ohio, and this trend holds even when superdelegates are removed from the picture.
Nevertheless, one could argue that a certain amount of electoral bias is an acceptable price to pay in the interests of federalism. The biggest outrage is not the subtle disparities in voting power, but the entirely anti-democratic influence of superdelegates. Among Democrats, superdelegates will comprise 19.6 percent of voters in the convention. These delegates represent no one but themselves when selecting a candidate and, given the closeness of this race, could determine the final result. This is less of a problem on the Republican side, as their unelected delegates only account for five percent of the votes at their convention.
The final (and most shameful) problem with the current system is the persistence of the caucus. Parties in fourteen states decided to use caucuses to allocate delegates to their conventions in 2008. While many idealize caucuses as the height of participatory democracy, they ignore the ugly irony that the caucuses seriously depress voter turnout. Caucuses require that voters travel to a certain location at a certain time on a certain day and remain there for hours. In so doing, caucuses effectively disenfranchise large swaths of the population and ensure disproportionate representation for fanatical partisans. Washington State is an excellent example, since it held both a caucus - which it used to allocate delegates - and a non-binding primary. In the caucus, Obama won 68 percent of the vote to Clinton's 31 percent, whereas in the primary the split was only 51-46 for Obama. Almost three times as many people voted in the primary, despite the fact that its outcome is not binding on the delegates.
The primaries are fundamentally flawed. While presidential candidates are no longer chosen in a dark, smoky room by corrupt politicians, we still have a long way to go. Every state should vote on the same day, and conventions and delegates should be replaced with a more representative national vote. This national primary would end the egregious disenfranchisement perpetrated by the caucuses and would put all American citizens on equal footing. When this important process is taken out of the hands of unrepresentative states and radical partisans, our democracy will be stronger and maybe, just maybe, we'll have some better choices come November.
Tyler Rosenbaum '11 hates participatory democracy
is a member of the 
