Hillary Clinton has a problem. Barack Obama needs something from Hillary. Together they have come up with a plan to circumvent the law and get what they both want.

Hillary’s campaign for president is millions of dollars in the hole and her big-money supporters have already given to her all the law allows ($2300 from each donor). Barack wants Hillary’s help in convincing her supporters to switch over and support him now that Hillary has ended her quest. Federal election law allows individuals to contribute the maximum to more than one candidate, so the plan is for Hillary to ask her big-money people to ante up to Barack and for Barack to use that money to pay off Hillary’s debts. In exchange then Hillary will throw her support to Barack and ask her followers to do the same.

This smells like money laundering to me. Under this plan some of Hillary’s backers will effectively be contributing twice the legal amount to her campaign.

Yesterday I recommended that we go to a runoff process in the election of our president. Today I’m saying that Florida should go back to holding runoff elections for state and local offices. We used to have runoffs but our legislators eliminated them. Runoff elections cost more but the real reason they were eliminated is that runoff-less elections favor incumbents.

Incumbents running for reelection can generally count on getting about a third of the vote without lifting a finger. There are a lot of mindless voters out there. If even a struggling incumbent lifts a finger she can probably pick up a few more votes. This just about guarantees an incumbent 40 percent of the vote — provided he is not in jail. This means that all the challenging candidates have to fight over the other 60 percent. For one of them to win he has to hold all the other challengers to less than 20 percent. This is difficult when there are more than two challengers.

Consider these results from a race that includes the incumbent and four challengers:

In an election without a runoff this incumbent retains her office despite the fact that 60 percent of the voters wanted someone else to hold the office. In a runoff Challenger 1 would stand a very good chance of defeating the incumbent. Forty percent of the vote is a very weak showing for an incumbent.

A runoff election process won’t hurt deserving incumbents. In fact, a popular incumbent will probably be elected without having to compete in the runoff. A runoff will make it easier to get rid of unpopular incumbents. But then they are the ones who got rid of the runoff process.

Let’s level the playing field by returning runoff elections to Florida. I can think of many better ways to save money than by corrupting the election process.

Ralph Nader has announced that he will run for president again. And people are already saying that he might take enough votes from the Democrat nominee to swing the election to the Republican nominee. Some believe that he kept Al Gore from becoming president in 2000. If they are correct, thank you Ralph Nader. But seriously, this problem needs to be fixed.

The problem is not that third party or independent candidates get into the race and act as spoilers for one of the two major parties. The problem is that the present system discourages good third party or independent candidates from running. That is, the major parties apply a lot of pressure to keep a candidate from running who might siphon off some of their votes.

What we need is a runoff system for the general election. We could hold the first election on the first Tuesday in October. Then the two candidates receiving the highest number of votes would advance to a runoff election on the first Tuesday in November.* With this process it would take a serious third party or independent candidate to keep the two major party candidates from reaching the November election where they will compete only against one another. But it would allow a candidate to challenge the major party candidates without becoming a spoiler.

Of course someone could argue that with this runoff process a fourth candidate could still spoil the chances of a more serious third candidate, but a two election runoff process is a lot better than what we have now.

A runoff process like I’ve described is the best way to nurture the emergence of a third party capable of challenging the two existing major parties. This is why we aren’t likely to ever have a runoff election. The two existing major parties aren’t going to approve it.
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*Most state and local elections that hold runoffs don’t require a candidate who receives a clear majority of the votes to compete in the runoff. In this case the runoff is unnecessary since the candidate has already received more votes than all the other candidates in the same race combined. In the race for president though the top two candidates would advance to a runoff even when one of them receives a clear majority of the popular vote. This is because presidents are selected by the Electoral College, not by the overall popular vote.

The ongoing kerfuffle over Florida moving its primary elections ahead of those in Iowa and New Hampshire has started me thinking again about getting rid of the state financed political party primaries. The Democrats have threatened not to seat any Florida delegates at its convention if the state follows through with moving its primaries up to January 2008. It appears that there is an issue about who owns the primary elections. The Democrat Party apparently thinks it should have some control over when they are held in each state but the states run and pay for the elections. I fail to see why we need primary elections.

Political parties are private organizations. Tax payers should not be expected to pay for their candidate selection processes. I’ve even read that the tax payers are subsidizing the party conventions to the tune of about 50 million dollars each. That should obviously stop. Each party should run and fund its own process of selecting the candidate that it wants to appear on each state’s general election ballot — or have all of them on the ballot. If they want that process to include a statewide referendum of registered party members, they can run it and pay for it themselves. They can even let convicted felons, illegal immigrants and Canadians vote if they so desire — or restrict voting to dues-paying party members.

Each state should hold its general election in early September with a runoff in early November. The September election should include all candidates that qualify in the state. That is, all Democrats, all Republicans, all Libertarians, all Greens, all independents and all anything (that qualifies). It should be the responsibility of each party to decide, as described above, which candidate(s) it wants on the ballot. The runoff election will be held if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes cast. The runoff ballot will include only the two candidates that receive the highest numbers of votes — even if both belong to the same party or both are independents.

Most likely each political party will want to winnow its field of candidates down to one to avoid splitting its vote in the general election. For example, the Democrats aren’t going to want two or more candidates in the general election when the Republicans have only one. But, a Republican or Democrat rebuffed by the party may elect to run as an independent. Remember Joe Lieberman in last year’s election in Connecticut.

I’m for anything that stands a chance of reducing the influence of the two major parties. That’s my opinion. What do you think?