Bob West: How to give Florida a bigger role in picking the president

Florida needs to have a bigger role in picking the next president. Florida is the third-largest state and the state that most reflects the rest of the states demographically.

Because of the way it is designed, the current national primary nomination system produces candidates elected by voters who do not reflect the majority of the party they are a member of.

To fix the problem, the Legislature should make the following changes via this year’s Election Departments bill:

1. Make the presidential preference primary an absentee ballot-only election. This means that the Florida election will be on March 1 as is in current law. The military ballots will be mailed 45 days ahead (s.101.62(4)(a) F.S.) or on Jan 16, 2016. Regular ballots will be mailed starting on the 26th of January. The Iowa caucuses are Jan. 18, New Hampshire is Jan 26. Making the election an absentee-only election will save the supervisors of elections a tremendous amount of money as they will not have to set up polling places.
2. Require the elections supervisors to count the ballots each night and publish the results of the current count every night. This will create tremendous interest in this election. Many nights, the Florida total will be larger than many individual state’s total. The candidates will work hard to make sure every Floridian votes. Florida will dominate the election news coverage. This will also have the added benefit that the supervisors will not need to buy extra equipment to count the absentees. They will be spacing the work out over 45 days.
3. Make the election an instant runoff election. One of the problems with the current system is that candidates who reflect their party values tend to split the party’s mainstream voters. This results in the nomination of candidates who do not reflect the party values. The instant runoff will nominate the candidate who best reflects the party’s values.
4. Sanction any party that diminishes Florida’s role in picking a party nominee. In the past, parties have diminished Florida voters’ influence in picking their parties’ nominee by giving them fewer votes. I would propose including in Florida law a provision that any party that diminished Florida’s role would have to run its candidates as a write-in candidate or as a no party candidate on the November ballot.

Those points are the essentials. Now, for all you bill-writing wonks, click on the following file to see my actual proposed statute changes: Bob West’s proposed statutes

Bob West is President of VotersDNA.org LLC. Bob does campaign consulting and database management and programming for candidates and other organizations. You can reach Bob at [email protected]. 850-322-5950. Column courtesy of Context Florida.