The Playoff System
The Playoff System |
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Another system presented at the Brock Commission’s Academic Forum was one designed by Professor Robert Loevy of Colorado College:
Under this system, states would be grouped by the relative size of their populations. There would be five voting days, with two weeks between each voting day. After each voting day, the number of candidates allowed to be on the ballot for the next voting day would decrease. Also, this system would require all states to have a proportional system of allocating national convention delegates to the presidential candidates.
On the first voting day, an unlimited number of candidates would be eligible to be on the primary or caucus ballot in each of the small population states in the first group.
On the second voting day, only the eight presidential candidates who received the greatest number of delegates on the first voting day would be on the primary or caucus ballot in the second group of states.
Only the six presidential candidates who received the highest cumulative number of delegates on the first and second voting day would be eligible to be on the ballot for the third voting day.
After the third voting day, the cumulative delegate allocation would again be tallied, and only the four candidates who had received the highest cumulative number of delegates would be allowed to be on the ballot for the fourth voting day.
The fourth group of states would eliminate the presidential candidates down to the two candidates who had been allocated the highest cumulative number of delegates after the fourth voting day.
On the fifth voting day, the fifth group, consisting of the largest population states, would vote on the two remaining presidential candidates.
After the fifth and last voting day, the candidates would continue to the national convention, where the candidate who has the highest total number of delegates would become the party's nominee. (Brock 2000, 32-33)
Table 15 and Figure 31 show a possible schedule for 2004. Figure 32 and Figure 33 are corresponding political and geographic maps.
The Brock Commission report noted no advantages to this idea. However, it has some of the merits of the Delaware Plan, which the commission recommended. By grouping states by population, it provides for a gradual increase in the sizes of the primary contests, and therefore in the cost of campaigning. This would tend to encourage more candidates to enter the race.
At the same time, the Playoff System has the same defect as the Delaware Plan; it forces a permanent ordering of the states, with the largest states voting last. This is manifestly unjust in that it effectively disenfranchises millions of citizens who would be forever barred from casting a meaningful ballot, since nominations would already be decided by the time they had the opportunity to vote.
Moreover, Professor Loevy’s system offers unique disadvantages. Mandating the elimination of candidates at each stage seems terribly heavy-handed and needlessly restrictive of public discourse. The Playoff System threatens to turn presidential politics into an interactive reality show in which audiences would vote a candidate “off the island” at the end of every episode.
It is one thing to down-select to two candidates for the purpose of a runoff election. In such a case, all of the candidates have previously faced all of the constituents for the office in contest. In presidential primaries, however, the candidates face the voters only once, a different set of voters in sequence. To deny people the right to vote for the candidates of their choice on the basis of a varying statutory limitation on the number of candidacies from one primary to another would probably constitute a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection principle.
In any case, to imagine the need for such a forced elimination formula is the height of optimism. Would that there were so many candidates capable of waging effective and protracted campaigns! This forced down-selection mechanism is a solution to a non-existent problem.