and democratic governors do?

Yeah that had dawned on me too. "Cede" is the proper word.

michty6,

I was bragging, not complaining! I had a great time. I think its kinda cool that we not only get to vote on who runs the country but we get to run the elections ourselves, with volunteers.

Turnout was high, enthusiasm was great; I got to do important work, saw most of my neighbors, helped a few other people while serving my own interests, and I got paid! What's not to love?

Most small- to medium-sized business owners find that local advertising fits better with their budgets and marketing goals. A 30-second time slot in a medium-sized market can be purchased for as little as $5 per 1,000 viewers, meaning that you could easily expect to pay less than $100 per commercial slot.
http://www.gaebler.com/Television-Advertising-Costs.htm

--

Accede means to give consent, approval, or adherence; agree; assent. I think the word you were looking for is just "cede".

I was an election judge. I put in a 20-hour day, worked 16-hours straight, and was paid a whopping $120! Don't tell me we don't know how to prioritize our election expenditures!

Busted!

TheStig,

"Blackmail" (in the finest tradition of ancient Scots!) is always the word that leaps to my mind. The Feds take money from the states and then "magnanimously" offer to return it—if the states will do as they're told.

Hahaha. Very ironic. Even more ironic is that America is so concerned with democracy that it spends many months and millions of dollars canvassing the country just to elect a party leader (who might never lead anything ever) - yet come actual election day, after months of spending billions of dollars, they don't actually have enough vote machines or staff to avoid massive queues and demotivate people to actually vote (not to mention the other forms of suppression and purging...)! $5 billion on electioneering? Sure! Few thousand dollars of vote machines/man power? Nah!

Now, now...

Our election costs—to the government, are actually quite stable and reasonable. Just administration costs, mostly, once every two years. All the cash you see being flung around, every day, every year, is private money from all the concerned citizens to poor to chance government taking any more money from us to pay down our bills. (Yeah, I know. You got the lack of rationality part right.)

—Lew

Not that we haven't been headed in that direction since—well, forever! And not that it wouldn't be a good idea where elections are concerned.—I'm just say'n... slippery slope, and all that. Let's just be very sure we really want to go there.

I have to disagree. I can think of nothing better than your proposal to encourage states to even greater efforts in manipulating voter rolls. Purge everyone who doesn't vote, (or doesn't vote "right,")--BAM! Instant 100% participation. First in line in the primaries. The one everyone else has to pander too! Let's automatically make the least scrupulous state the most influential!

What a recipe for disaster. ...Unintended consequences my friend. Always guard your posterior against them!

A good graph on turnout:

http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/blog_turnout_2012.jpg

I like your objective, and I'm all for making voting as fair and inclusive as possible, but I worry if mending our presidential elections might not have the unintended result of making our creaky primary/caucus system even worse. The phrase "nine, nine, nine" is still ringing in my ears.

I don't have any specific objections to your plan, I just think it needs to be Red Teamed a bit. In general, I think the political parties ought to have a lot of discretion in figuring out how they choose their standard bearers. Getting the states involved dilutes the utility of parties, they end up being fund raising machines, to the detriment of their policy making function.

Fair warning, I also like my concept of choosing presidential candidates with an elimination tournament style series of primaries, (very loosely)modeled after NCAA basketball. Absolutely nothing else in the world should be modeled after the NCAA.

I thought there was supposed to be some sort of deficit in America??

Oh I forgot. Rational things like raising taxes, cutting the largest discretionary spending costs (the military) and cutting unnecessary, crazy spending on things like elections are off the table. It's the MOOCHERS you have to worry about!

LB,
Don't be silly - you are trying to apply numbers logic and facts to Republican arguments! That's insane! The problem with your analysis is that there isn't enough rhetoric or pointing out how evil Obama is, meaning it isn't proper right-wing thinking...

NY,
regardless of whether or not it's funded, state legislators will find ways to turn a federal incentive program to the personal advantage of themselves and their campaign contributors, not the collective good of their constituents

Bingo.

I think the flaw in your idea CW (and the Bills being floated that give $ incentives to the States) is that Republican Governors just don't care. They'd much rather rig the election and stop people voting to maintain Republican power than get a few extra $ or (heaven forbid!) act in the best interest of their citizens.

And mail-in voting should be standard practice across America. But then this would mean more people voting . And that would mean Republicans would either have to change their policies (you know, to represent the will of the masses like in a true democracy - heaven forbid!) or end up losing a lot.

So it makes much more sense for Republicans to continue to support voter suppression. If you can't have popular policies, screw democracy and try to rig the system so that more of the people who like your policies come out to vote.

regardless of whether or not it's funded, state legislators will find ways to turn a federal incentive program to the personal advantage of themselves and their campaign contributors, not the collective good of their constituents. when there's a directive from above, like clockwork more taxpayer dollars go to schemes that increase the campaign chests and re-election chances of incumbents. without checks on campaign finance, i practically guarantee that this would backfire.

Now the good news.

Primaries are not a function of the Government. They are functions of the Political Parties. Some States don't even have primaries. Only delegates to the National Conventions are elected. So the path may not be as tough as I imagine.

But certain States (NH) have laws that require the Political Parties in their States to hold Primaries at a certain time i.e. first. You may recall that this requirement almost pushed the NH Primary into Christmas in 2011.

You just can't make the Right media happy. If it's not gifts and ObamaPhones (for everybody but ME, evidently) that got him elected, now it's pointing out that 8 of the 10 highest median income counties carried Obama by wide margins. So it's po' folks and rich liberals. OH! The INDIGNITY!

Wait a minute... Let's do some cipherin' here. If 47% are slackers and people with new phones who always vote Democrat, and, for round numbers, 100 million people vote, then all they need is 3 million more to have a majority. And in just New York, NJ, San Fransisco, and LA, you have about 10 million who fit the Rich Liberal profile. Hmm.

If I were speaking to a bunch of FatCats who I want to write me checks, I'm not sure I'd use a number that tells them I'm beat.