In theory, the primary votes of every state should count equally.  However, through a process that benefits certain states via party rules, states that vote earlier in the presidential primary process seem to have a veto power that allows them to "narrow" the field and thus prevent voters who vote later from considering candidates who may be better qualified than the ones that survive the early primaries.

Because of the current system, many good candidates are forced to drop out and this leaves a sense that many states--even after the creation of "Super Tuesday" and other front-loading devices--are selecting from "leftovers."

I propose a system of conducting primaries and caucuses so that different states will be allowed to conduct their primaries so that they have a more equal chance of voting early, thus allowing their votes to count equally and improving the quality of the nominees.

The main features of this proposal are:

(1) The country would be divided into four regions (East, Southeast, Midwest, West).  Each region would be assigned a month in which their states would be allowed to schedule their primaries or caucuses anytime within that month.

(2) The order in which the regions would vote would be determined by lottery, or the regions would rotate in future presidential election years.

(3) Optionally, states with four or fewer representatives (20 at present) and the District of Columbia would have the opportunity to be selected by lottery for two of them to vote in the month before the first region votes.

The advantages to changing the process include:  each state will have the opportunity to have the focus on itself (without front-loading), candidates can stay in a given region for the month (as opposed to campaigning across the country on a given week), candidates can recover from losses in a given state and be able to continue in the primaries, states would hold the attention of the candidates and media longer into the process, small states would still have the possibility of being the first to vote, and sanity could be restored to the process.

Of course, to change this long-standing practices would have to be abandoned and there would be considerable resistance.  I feel that party rules are not enough of a reason to keep a process that prevents the best candidates from being nominated and nominates candidates whom many voters do not want.  I feel that this affects all Americans, and that is why I am proposing this change.  I am hoping that the national and state parties will seriously consider these changes in order to increase the participation of Americans in the process of nominating a president.