In a great many ways, America’s electoral system is sorely in need of reform. A recent post on this site touched on the apparent demise of publicly-financed elections due to the pernicious influence of big-moneyed interests. Now comes word, in today’s New York Times, that the jockeying among states for ever more influential position in the Presidential primary schedule is getting out of control:

Big States’ Push for Earlier Vote Scrambles Race

As many as four big states — California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey — are likely to move up their 2008 presidential primaries to early next February, further upending an already unsettled nominating process and forcing candidates of both parties to rethink their campaign strategies, party officials said Wednesday.

The changes, which seem all but certain to be enacted by state legislatures, mean that the presidential candidates face the prospect of going immediately from an ordered series of early contests in relatively small states in January to a single-day, coast-to-coast battlefield in February, encompassing some of the most expensive advertising markets in the nation.

The changes would appear to benefit well-financed and already familiar candidates and diminish the prospects of those with less money and name recognition going into such a highly compressed series of contests early next year. [full text]

In short, the changes will further elevate the role that wealth—or the lack thereof—plays in American politics and further limit the breadth and diversity of choices available to the voting public. Simply put, it is bad for democracy. A more orderly and fair system for scheduling Presidential primaries needs to be enacted. Fortunately, a plan for such does exist, and it is supported by groups such as FairVote, which describes it as follows:

The Graduated Random Presidential Primary System, or The American Plan (sometimes known as the California Plan), is designed to begin with contests in small-population states, where candidates do not need tens of millions of dollars in order to compete. A wide field of presidential hopefuls will be competitive in the early going. A “minor candidate’s� surprise successes in the early rounds, based more on the merit of the message than on massive amounts of money, will tend to attract money from larger numbers of small contributors for the campaign to spend in later rounds of primaries. Thus there should be more longevity of candidacy, and more credible challengers to the “front-runners.� However, as the campaign proceeds, the aggregate value of contested states becomes successively larger, requiring the expenditure of larger amounts of money in order to campaign effectively. A gradual weeding-out process occurs, as less-successful candidates drop out of the race. The goal is for the process to produce a clear winner in the end, but only after all voices have had a chance to be heard. [full text]

Ironically, in order to have a system in place wherein all voices have a chance to be heard, more voices will first need to be heard demanding a change to the status quo and support for proposals such as the American Plan. To remain silent is to be silenced.