The Graduated Random System The Baseline Design

In a truly fair primary system, other states would have an opportunity to hold the first presidential primary. But if a large state such as California or Texas went first, a low-budget campaign would never get off the ground. It takes Big Money to win in a big state. The advantage of having small states hold the first few primaries is that Big Money has less of an impact in the early going. Early victories by less moneyed candidates in small venues enables them to attract contributions that allow them to advance to the later rounds of primaries. Such a process favors the candidate with the best message, rather than the loudest bullhorn. In the interest of encouraging a larger and more diverse field of candidates at the beginning of the process of choosing the next president of the United States, the idea of having the smaller states hold the early primaries should be preserved.

An ideal presidential primary system, therefore, would meld the best feature of the traditional schedule--smaller early, bigger later--with the idea of moving the date of each state’s primary from year to year. The Graduated Random Presidential Primary System is such a plan.

This system, which can be alternatively referred to as the American Plan, features a schedule consisting of 10 two-week intervals, during which randomly selected states may hold their primaries. This 20-week schedule is the approximate length of the traditional presidential primary season. The schedule is weighted as an ascending scale based on each state's number of congressional districts. The actual number of delegates for each state would be set by the political parties themselves, as they always have been. American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, which also send delegates to both national conventions, are each counted as one district in this system, although they in fact have no voting representatives in Congress. When these are added to the 435 congressional districts, the Graduated Random System comprises a total of 440 districts. It happens that this number is equal to:

10
Σ 8n
n=1

The conceptual basis of the Graduated Random System includes both types of geopolitical entities in the federal system of government--the state and the congressional district--which incidentally is also the basis of the Electoral College, the constitutional body that actually elects the president. Thus the Graduated Random System is intellectually consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of the Constitution, which balances the interests of the permanent, arbitrary geopolitical units (the states) and the transitory, population-based political units (the congressional districts) through the clockwork-like, interlocking mechanism of the bicameral legislature. No other proposed system of presidential primary reform reflects the duality of the federal system; rather, they focus solely on the states.

In the first interval, a randomly determined combination of states with a combined total of eight congressional districts would hold their primaries, caucuses, or conventions. This is approximately equal to the total number of congressional districts in Iowa (5) and New Hampshire (2), thus preserving the door-to-door “retail politicking.” However, these two particular states would not necessarily comprise the first round. Any state or combination of states amounting to a total of eight congressional districts could be in the first round of primaries and caucuses. This could include such ethnically diverse jurisdictions as American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, and Maryland (see Table 2). These jurisdictions have large proportions of people of color such as Asians, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Native Americans, and African Americans (see Table 3), and 17 of the 38 first-round eligible jurisdictions have poverty rates above the national average (see Table 4). Opening the first contests to this field of jurisdictions would empower demographic groups that the current system marginalizes. (U.S. Census Bureau 2002)

In the second period--two weeks later--the eligibility number would increase to 16 (8 x 2). Every two weeks, the combined size of the contests would grow by eight congressional districts, until a combination of states totaling 80 congressional seats (8 x 10)--nearly one-fifth of the total--would be up for grabs in the tenth and last interval toward the end of June. As the political stakes increased every two weeks, a steady weeding-out process would occur, as less successful campaigns reached the point at which they were no longer competitive in these larger contests. This system would foster the widest possible political debate would be fostered by this system, commensurate with the need to resolve the debate to one or two viable candidacies at the end of the primary process.

A computer program that implements this system is provided in Appendix 1. Table 5 shows a typical primary schedule generated by the Graduated Random System’s implementation software application, and Figure 2 is a graph of the time distribution of the number of congressional districts in which the primaries occur. Figure 3 is a corresponding political map of the United States (weighted by congressional districts) generated by the software. A geographic map is given in Figure 4. Appendix 2 contains 20 sample schedules generated by the software.

The random process for generating the schedule every four years would be administered by the Federal Election Commission. The system would also be reformulated every ten years as congressional districts were reapportioned among the states based on the Federal Census. To preclude homesteading, the schedule for each presidential election year would be announced shortly before the beginning of the campaign season, possibly on the first Tuesday in November of the preceding year.

A handy way to conceptualize how the Graduated Random Presidential Primary System would operate is to compare it to the Parker Brothers board game Risk, a strategy game that lets you conquer the world. In Risk, each player starts out with a small number of armies, so no one gets blown out of the game early. However, every time a player turns in cards, she gets more armies than the previous player did when he turned in his. The winners get stronger, the losers get weaker, and one by one players are swept from the board. The game cannot go on forever, though, because as increasingly massive forces scythe across the continents, it eventually becomes mathematically improbable for two players to remain on the board. The game is designed to produce a winner in about three hours of play. The Graduated Random System would work in much the same way; every two weeks the delegate prize would get larger and larger, until nearly one-fifth of the delegate total would be at stake in the final two weeks of the campaign.

Small states like Iowa and New Hampshire would be eligible for the entire primary season. They might get lucky and be first, get stuck with the last interval, or end up somewhere in the middle. Not every state would have a chance to go first, but every state would have an opportunity to be last. No one region of the country would consistently have an advantage over all the others, while there would be equal advantage in being a large, small, or medium-size state.