Last month, Wired profiled ObamaCycle, a social network that helps Obama supporters send each other campaign materials like rally signs and bumper stickers. As the primary season progressed from state to state, supporters living in states that had already held contests found themselves with more schwag than they knew what to do with. So, aided by the social network creation service Ning, ObamaCycle was set up as a way to connect the schwag-laden supporters with the schwag-needing supporters in upcoming primary states.

It’s a terrific idea, and it made me wonder why Ning hasn’t been used in politics more this year. From what I can tell, ObamaCycle is the biggest political social network on Ning. There are about a dozen social networks set up for Obama, very few for Ron Paul, and absolutely none for Hillary Clinton. What gives?

As profiled on TechCrunch, Ning is essentially a free white label social networking service. The administrator tools let anyone create their own social network, and customize it with user-friendly tools. Members of a network can connect in a discussion forum, send messages to each other, create groups, embed YouTube videos and external feeds, play with widgets, and publicize the social network externally using badges. And yes, Ning does display those oh-so valuable email addresses to the social network administrator.

It’ll be interesting to see if this incredibly useful tool gets traction in the political world. I’m thinking a smart Congressional campaign might pick up on it.

Well here we are. The race between Clinton and Obama is stagnant and ugly. The primary season has lasted fifteen months, even though voting has only been going on for a mere three months. No pretty way for this to all end as Democrats nonsensically attack other Democrats, both through the media and online. It doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. A combination of common sense and technology can make 2016 a much better primary season.

For the impatient reader, the solution lies in an online primary held at Democrats.org (the DNC’s site) that counts every single vote before declaring a winner. For the details, read on…

The Problems

There are so many. You know all of them. So, a set of bullet points is most concise:

• Iowa and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status is ludicrous.
• Too many states front-loaded on February 5.
• Michigan and Florida knowingly broke party rules, held their primaries in January, and now everyone is blaming everyone else for their delegate mess.
• Caucuses are confusing, and delegate allocation in caucus states is even more confusing.
• Too many candidates and too much campaigning in 2007.
• Superdelegates (aka unpledged delegates) seem undemocratic, and no one can explain what their purpose is.
• Any delegates can change their mind come Convention, whether they are pledged or unpledged.

The Goals

The entire system needs to be taken completely apart and put back together. There are really two goals for the primary season:

1. Choose the best possible Democratic nominee for the General Election.
2. Build the Democratic Party.

Simple. So let’s rethink the whole shebang, completely change around how things are done, and come up with a system that achieves those two goals.

What to Drop

Ditch delegates, superdelegates, and caucuses. The whole delegate system is archaic. The one argument for caucuses is that they build the Party. That may be true, but there are far better ways to do so.

Cancel the Convention. No delegates? No need for the dog and pony show that is the Democratic National Convention. To actually be able to attend one of these things as a delegate requires the selling of one’s soul (okay, that’s an exaggeration).

Stop states from deciding their own primary dates. Why in the world should a Republican Governor or Republican Legislature be deciding when Democrats hold their own party’s primaries? At best, it leads to confusion, like when residents in states not voting on Super Duper Tuesday wondered why they couldn’t vote that day. At worst, it leads to a messy, internal battle, like Michigan and Florida.

The Solution

Divide the country into six regions, each holding their primaries two weeks apart. Begin at the end of January, hold two regional primaries in February, two in March, and the last one in early April. All fifty states, DC, and the territories get to have their say. The six regions are:

• Pacific – California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, Guam (and other Pacific territories)
• Mountain West – Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Americans Abroad
• Central – Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri
• Midwest – Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa
• South – Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico
• Northeast – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, DC, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire , Maine

With the exception of the Mountain West, all regions have at least one “big” state. But a candidate can choose to play in the many smaller states, and rack up votes that way.

The order of the regional primaries is decided by a random drawing on the Tuesday after Labor Day, the September before the election year. This shortens the primary season, and keeps campaigns on their toes. If they don’t know where to campaign, they won’t.

Each regional primary is three days long, Tuesday through Thursday. Everyone who wants to vote should be able to. And no, state governments won’t push back because…

The primary is held online at Democrats.org. Yes, it’s time for liberals to stop being afraid of electronic voting. There’s nothing wrong with doing important things online. We file our taxes online. We do our banking online. The problem has been in the companies and the software behind it. That won’t be a problem for us.

The online voting system will be open source. Linux and Mac OS X are built on open source technologies. Microsoft Windows is not. Linux and Mac OS X are rock-solid and secure. Windows is not. Open source software is the answer to the problems with online voting.

All primary voters must register at Democrats.org. Want to build a national voter database? Want to build the party everywhere? Want to avoid being held hostage to what a state government decides is best for a national party’s primary process? This is the solution. Beats the hell out of the caucus system to boot.

For those voters who do not have Internet access, they can both register and vote in the three day period at Internet voting stations set up by their precinct captains. These can be at a local library, school, church, or even a home.

The Democratic Nominee is decided via the popular vote of the entire country. Everyone’s votes are counted equally.

A Democratic National Conference will be held in the summer. Yes, a conference and not a convention. A conference like Yearly Kos/Netroots Nation or SxSW, but much, much bigger. Keynote speakers will be our Presidential and Vice-Presidential Nominees. The Democratic Party should take over an entire city for a weekend. Activists from all fifty states are free to come, not to be delegates, but to attend sessions, network with fellow activists, and of course, party. Strategy can be planned for the upcoming fall races. Money can be raised.

Conclusion

I’ve purposefully left the details of the online voting system vague, because by 2016 we don’t know exactly what form it may take. But keeping it open-source and run by the DNC will keep its integrity. The primary process should be about choosing the best candidate while building the party. I think the proposals above accomplish that.

Of course, these are just a few ideas. Many are a radical departure from how things are today, but all are grounded in common sense. What do you think?

Welcome to the new, improved Leftmost Bit. Things around here have changed considerably after a long period of light posting. First, this is no longer my all-encompassing tumblelog hosted on Tumblr. Second, as noted in the sidebar, Leftmost Bit now has a very specific focus: covering the intersection of technology and politics. I had realized that my Tumblr posts were sort of all over the map, and that many of my very good-looking readers (that includes you!) are just not interested in all the same things I’m interested in. A post on politics followed by a post on Ruby on Rails just didn’t make much sense.

So, I’ve built a bit of a blog network for myself. My homepage now lives at LuigiMontanez.com, which will act as an aggregator for all my public online activities. As already stated, Leftmost Bit is re-purposed to act as a blog focusing exclusively on the world of politics and how technology affects it.

Salesforce on Rails is where I get technical: a blog on web application development (what I actually get paid to do). While there are scores of Ruby on Rails blogs out there, there aren’t many yet on web development using Salesforce’s Force.com technology. Lastly, Social Graph Theory covers my newest area of interest: building an open Social Graph. I think we’re all starting to realize that despite all the great advances of Web 2.0 and sites like Facebook, there’s still something not quite right about how we define and create our social relationships online. Many very smart people are working on addressing these concerns, and exploring this field in greater depth is something I look forward to doing.

If you subscribed to the previous incarnation of Leftmost Bit in your feedreader, you don’t have to do anything to continue receiving my posts on the intersection of politics and technology. For the other two topics, here’s the feed for Salesforce on Rails and here’s the feed for Social Graph Theory.