Talk about an area that is ripe for innovation. Sure, progress has been made by candidates who are leveraging “new” technology such as blogs, MySpace profiles, (etc.), plus many states are jockeying to reposition themselves on the Primary calendar to make their state’s impact on candidate selection greater. Here are some thoughts to fix what I see as wrong with the process:
1) Eliminate polling that shows ranking of candidates (limit polling to topics/issues).
Benefits:
a) Stimulates voters to pay better attention to candidates and to think for themselves.
b) Stimulates Media to stop its approach of segregating the field between “Tier 1” and others …. to me, the most shameful part of the Presidential Campaign process. Both parties have many candidates (8-10+), yet watching the media, it appears that each party only has 3 candidates each. Why does the public allow the media to take this de facto filtering approach?
2) Have a National Primary Day for all 50 states, followed by run-off national elections per party until each party has one candidate with 50%+ of the vote. Sure, this “unthinkable” approach puts financial pressures on the candidates to promote themselves in so many markets at once, but splitting Iraq into 3 countries had been an unthinkable approach up until very recently too. (Maybe another area for reform is to look at what the Media charges candidates for exposure. Can the public demand that the publics’ airwaves have X% allocated to the publics’ business of driving awareness for future elected officials?)
Why not?!
No comments:
Post a Comment