this past march 5th, colorado passed legislation that cancelled the primary elections. (several other states have done so) the reason is that this will save money (in colorado it saved 2.2 million dollars, once) because of budget problems.



now, the questions are:
Is this not highly anti-democratic? is it right to take the option for people to select who they would like as president? why should people in these states rely on the other states to decide for them?

(edited for spell check)

A primary is not necessary to democracy, unless there is some statute limiting the number of candidates from a given Party. I think that the "one candidate per Party" thing is a tradition, not necessarily a law. Eliminating primaries will muddy the general election, for sure though. And more run-off elections will probably be required as a result.

I don't think it is un-democratic, it is just inefficient.

Personally, I kind of like the idea of not having primaries. Maybe you really like John Kerry, but loathe Howard Dean and Dean gets elected in the primaries, now you're forced to decide between voting party line or something.

It would be interesting to see how many votes Al Sharpton would actually get during the final countdown.

Judging how things are turning out in the California recall, having as many people on the ballot as wish to toss in their hat might be a bit of a disaster. It's one thing to have 10 people on the ballot. It's another to have 10,000. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have more of a choice, heck, most of the time I can't find anyone worth voting for on the ballot, but there's a difference between choice and chaos.

It seems to me that the decision on how a political party choses their candidate should be left up to that party. If they want to have a primary election, fine, they should pay for it. If they want to draw names out of a hat then they should buy their own hat and do it that way.

Primaries are just to get rid of the unwanted candidates. There is no "Anti-Democracy" in this what so ever.