NP: Pandora.com

So, Florida is in electoral news again. This time, they're the straw breaking the camel's back when it comes to the mad rush for many states to hold their primaries earlier in the year, threatening to kick off the formal part of the 2008 election in calendar year 2007.

In an effort to help Franklin Foer write a second volume of How Soccer Explains The World, how about a rotation? There would be a two-state kickoff and maybe three or four discrete primary dates with roughly the same number of electoral votes/delegates. You could either assign the states randomly each time, or create four static groups, and the order of those groups would change each presidential election cycle. Mid-term elections would have the same order as either the preceding or the subsequent presidential cycle.

The two-state kickoff would be the tricky part. It could be by lottery, or by some sort of selection process. And there's the bigger question of who would administrate such a solution, as you've got the national committees of the two main parties to contend with, but this should be a universal, national solution, and that means the FEC, and I have no idea if they've got the resources to attempt something like this.

Feel free to shoot holes in the idea. And I think I'd prefer a national, open primary, but I know that's never going to happen.