Where do we go from here

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's eloquent and gracious exit speech yesterday, we now know who the two major nominees will be to succeed George W. Bush as president of the United States. Now steps must be taken to make sure party nominees are never selected this way again.

Here's what needs to be done.

Have all states vote via primaries and eliminate caucuses. Here in Texas (and I'm sure there is a version of this in most other states) we have something called early voting which means you are not disenfranchised if, for some reason, you know you will not be able to or simply don't want to go to your designated voting place on election day. It also allows those U.S. citizens who are out of the country (serving in the miltary, civilian job assignments, etc.) to take part in the election process. But there's no early voting in the caucus system. Caucuses also eliminate the privacy of the vote -- there are no secret ballots in a caucus. Finally they require more of a time commitment than simple voting. It took me less than five minutes to vote in my party's presidential primary, but almost 2 1/2 hours to vote in my post-election precinct caucus.

Divide the country into multi-state regions -- Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, Far West, Northwest -- and then have the states in each region hold their primaries on the same day. Also, rotate every four years the sequence in which the regions vote. As it stands right now, two unrepresentative states, Iowa and New Hampshire, have way too much influence on the nomination process. And when candidates have to campaign in, say, Ohio and Texas simultaneously because those states have their primaries on the same day, it drives up campaign travel costs.

The Republican Party needs to begin allocating delegates according to the percentage of the vote they receive in a primary. In a four-candidate primary, the winner could have 30 percent of the popular vote (meaning 70 percent did not want this candidate to be the nominee), yet walk out of that state with all of its primary delegates. And the Democratic Party needs to do a better job of allocating its delegates based on the primaries; it's ridiculous that Sen. Barach Obama won the majority of Texas delegates when Sen. Clinton won the majority of the popular votes in the Texas primary.

The Democrats also have to get rid of that Superdelegate foolishness. That's not democratic -- it reeks of the days of Tammany Hall when party bosses decided everything and the people were powerless.

I am not arguing that candidates Sen. John McCain and Sen. Obama are not the ones favored by a majority of the voters within their respective parties. I am just saying the process needs to be made more transparent, it must be simplified and it should adhere to the concept of one-person, one vote.