The idea is that if no candidate can garner support of 60% of the Democratic electorate, it should be up to the party professionals -- which makes perfect sense to me.

I would get rid of caucuses -- Obama showed how to game the system, and destroyed the rationale for caucuses in the process (caucuses are designed to give PARTY activists a say, when a personality cult overwhelms the caucus system, it doesn't help the party on the local level.)

As far as the calendar goes, "Red" states should be stuck at the back of the line.  

Switch to a popular vote system would pretty much institutionlize the Red State/Blue State dichotomy.  Democrats would pretty much ignore small states as they would get almost nothing from them.

What of the Democratic Convention?  Do away with that as well?  

How bout something a little less extreme?  Perhaps have the DNC do away with caucuses and have a random schedule for elections?  

But as much as caucuses do appeal to me in a romantic sense, I think it would make much more sense to ask all the states to hold actual elections where people go into a voting booth and vote the same way they do in the general election.

    Get rid of all super delegates

    Get rid of all caucuses voting formats

    Have only primaries as the only format

    Have only registered democrats vote in each state primary

    Have all the states vote on one single day.  I suggest the second Tuesday of May
    A super super Tuesday

    Have from May 1st to the date of the primary election date for all voters to vote early or absentee to include mail in ballots for any voter who would not be able to physically get to a voting precinct.

    All candidates would have from November of the previous year to May 15 to do all their campaigning.  That is 6 months of campaigning or 26.5 weeks.  They can pick where they want to campaign.

    Then it's completely over.  You then would probably have until June the 1st to get a complete and certified count of all the delegate count and the popular vote.  

    If no one candidates reaches the required delegate number then the winner will be chosen by who ever has the most popular vote count.  

I would like to see closed primaries, with registration allowed up to a few days before the primary.  

I would like a review of the delegate weighting system.  It doesn't make sense.

And I would cut down the number of superdelegates.  It's been overused as a perk, apparently.  Who isn't a super delegate now?

And I would keep the convention and delegate system.

(b) I don't see how you can call caucuses phony. They're a lot of things. They're against our principle of a secret ballot. They're annoying. They're sort of untransparent (while having the illusion of greater transparency, of course). But I don't think they're phony any more than our representative democracy is a "phony" democracy because it requires federal and state representatives. Or a union's decision making process is (apart from real, scandalous corruption) necessarily "phony" because it requires dues and often have no secret balloting. There isn't just one form of "true" democracy, democracy is just a method of having people control the government through a technical process, which may vary.

The state took absolute control.  Don't forget Katherine Harris was the state.

One of the reasons I would like to see this race go to the Convention is that the entire primary system is clearly not designed either to choose the best candidate or to include a majority of Democrats in the selection process, and I think the only way to force a major overhaul is to go right up to and over the brink of disaster: a brokered convention.

The state party organizations exist for much more than selecting a presidential candidate every 4 years and you want to change all the rules to accomplish one single task.

How about starting out by trying to establish what the goals are for revising the methodology, mesh them with the goals of the various state party organizations and THEN you can start to revise the selection process.

If there is one thing that I have agreed with Howard Dean, it's the fact that Democrats put too much emphasis on presidential selections and they should be involved in local partitions...getting quality candidates at city/county/state levels, being competitive everywhere at every level.

It would eradicate a Momentum/Movement dynamic from the process.  You get that one win in an Iowa caucus and you're an instant front runner.

Which is great cause I think movements make horrible choices.  They are motivated by hysteria and anger, and they show up at caucusses and filibuster the process.

OTOH, this primary has been enlightening, but not necessarily in a painful way.  It's gotten more people involved in the process than have been in a long time.  I don't expect the next president to solve every new one generated by Bush, but making some necessary 180's would be fabulous.

I don't like caucuses, because it shuts out people who would normally feel comfortable voting behind a curtain, physically or emotionally.  That was definitely highlighted this time around.  

I had lots of fun at my first caucus here in Texas (who knew we even had them?), but that is the last time I ever want to do that.  Still, I don't want the primaries decided by popular vote if the general election is decided by the electoral college, especially when places like Texas have open primaries that lead to Republicans trying to foist the weakest candidate on us.

Anyway, this is what I would suggest.

1. Keep the delegates but make the states winner take all.

2. The states that decide to have caucuses instead of primaries suffer a 50% penalty in delegates. For example, if your state has 50 delegates and you decide to have a caucus you now only get 25 delegates. I see this as a carrot and stick approach to the total elimination of caucuses.

3. Once EVERY state has gone to a primary mode, then you can switch to the popular vote count for the nomination.

The Black Panthers were targeted by the FBI and arrested not for what they had done but for what the FBI was afraid they would do.

I want a truncated calendar so that factions can not develop too deeply as they have this year.  Nothing has dismayed me more than the hate that now exists amongst good democrats.

So as far as caucuses, primaries, superdelegates, delegates, popular vote, etc. I think thats too much ground for me to try and cover here and I dont know if I have a particular view or expertise to opine on that.  All I really care is that whatever it is it is followed.

But as someone whos state never got a say, Im tickled this year that all will get a say, as I said, I mind that its over such a long period where factions have been allowed to grow.

So maybe a calendar something like this.  

No active campaigning anywhere 2 months before the first primary (how that would be achieved I do not know).

Choose a date (say Feb 1) for the first couple primaries (say 2 to 4 primaries).  As said above by someone I forgot (my apologies to you) let the first 2 to 4 primaries be based on those states that had the highest dem versus republican ratio of votes in the last general election.

Three weeks after that have a second round of primaries with a few states (maybe 4 to 6).  States this time as picked by the DNC for whatever reasons they see fit.

Then three weeks after that open up a 2 month (or 1.5 month) window where the remaining states can go whenever the heck they want, but they have to set their date 1 year (or some such time) in advance so reasonable planning can take place.

If there are supers, they can not commit to a candidate before the final large primary window opens up and must commit within 2 weeks after the final date of the large window.

The convention gets held 2 months after the end of the large primary window.

As long as the calendar is tight I think we can avoid a lot of the fractricide that is going on.  The problem with a short process though is it weighs name recognition, money and machine backing quite heavily.  But that doesnt mean a no name this election cycle who loses wont get a chance the next time when their name recognition should theoretically be much higher.

Im sure my take has holes, but thats what I got.

First off, my instinct is to like this.  I like having people count, and I like keeping the process short, to a degree.

But, I really see some merit to the arguement that folk outside of a major population center would basically not count in this system.  It also enshrines anyone who can raise the money to go on the air quickly.

My favored alternative, I forget where I saw it first, was to do 4 rounds of decisions.  1 a month, perhaps.  Groups of 12 states, by population, small states first.  Gives less well-known candidates time to be seen, gives the states a bit of equality (population of small states is balanced by their earlier positioning), and gets the process up and over within a reasonable time.

Whatever the system is, someone will figure how to game it and get some sort of metric 'lead' for some bozo that does not represent the Dem base and cannot win in November. The only way to get a realistic and timely decision is with a large group of unpledged, wild-card people who can tip the balance at the last minute if necessary.  SDs are people recently elected (members of Congress, Senate, Governors) and elders like Gore and Carter. We might get rid of SDs like Brazile who were never elected by the public. But some group of SDs is needed to keep the process in balance with the electorate who have actually voted people  into office over the past several years.

What's more important, is reducing the power of people like Dean and Brazile (deciding which states can go first) -- and deciding whose votes will be counted! The current mess is only partly because of 'rules' -- but greatly because of Brazile's RULINGS that did NOT follow the actual DNC rules.