Burton Speaks

Something that's frustrated me for the past several presidential elections is that, being a proud citizen of the great state of Oregon, my vote doesn't count in the presidential primary elections. If you look at the calendar, we aren't quite the last state have our primary elections - but we might as well be. We are followed by the highly populated and significant states of Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, and South Dakota. (Yes, that last bit was sarcasm.)

You see, by the time we get around to having our primaries, unless it's a very close race (unlikely), pretty much everyone but the front-running candidate has dropped out. So yes, we get to choose from a field of one, which just doesn't give me that warm fuzzy feeling that I usually get from democracy. So all this news and hoopla is interesting and it gives people something to watch on TV, but here in Oregon it really can only be of academic interest since the rest of the nation gets to tell us who the actual candidates are.

I'd like to see the system change. I'd like to see it switch so that everyone gets a chance to vote, so that there's no clear winner or loser until everyone has had a chance to vote - yet I can see that, for the primaries, having everyone vote on the same day might not be a great idea. Is that unrealistic? Perhaps. I doubt some of the more obscure candidates would make it past the first round of voting, but perhaps the few at the top could duke it out until the end.

But this is all an idle wish, at this point. I don't even know what the steps to change would be. I might be content with moving our primary to Super Tuesday as a first step in local change... perhaps I should figure out what I'd have to do...