n recent elections, reform-minded Americans have had their usual doubts about the manifestly undemocratic and clunky Electoral College, and a completely new set of deep doubts have arisen about how accurately the electronic voting systems have recorded the wishes of voters. There has also been some justifiable concern about how partisan election officials have purged the voter rolls. Despite the various concerns, and attempts to address them, the use of primary elections to choose party candidates has, surprisingly, escaped critical examination. People discuss how to make the primaries more efficient, more representative. But the real question should be, why are they held at all?

They are unique to the United States, which is even more anomalous, considering its national reputation, maybe not always deserved, for keeping government out of civic affairs. No other democratic country with embedded electoral traditions allows a state or federal government to determine how political parties choose their candidates or to run elections for them. Although it was only in the 1970s that primaries supplanted party conventions as the means of choosing presidential candidates, familiarity has bred undeserved contentment with the process. Primaries have been part of the U.S. electoral system for a century, and have thus acquired a patina of constitutional respectability, even though the Founding Fathers wisely never mentioned them, nor indeed political parties, for which George Washington and others had a profound distrust. The change has not necessarily advanced democracy, let alone the Democrats.

AN ACCELERATED SCHEDULE—Under discussion now is a move by several state governments to hold their primaries earlier in the year. Nevada is seeking to hold a primary for Democrats before the traditional lead-off polling in New Hampshire, and South Carolina will stage its primary right afterwards. The number of states that participate in Super Tuesday on February 5 could leap next year from six to fourteen, with powerhouses like California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey joining in. Less than a month after the Iowa caucuses, the nominations could already be decided on both sides.

Since anything that puts an end to the opportunity for auto-evisceration that is a presidential primary has to be a good thing, a concentrated early primary may be welcome news. It would allow a rapid nomination and would give the winning candidate time to brush off some of the mud slung before the general election.

On the other hand, it means that prospective candidates to be the presidential nominee are already on the hoof a year in advance. Already 19 candidates (give or take Newt Gingrich) have declared or are "exploring" a run for president. The very weekend that Hillary Clinton announced that she was "in to win," New Mexico governor Bill Richardson pitched himself as a "uniter, a healer," and Kansas senator Sam Brownback posed as a "full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative." They are all spending freely and are prepared to keep on sprinkling greenbacks for the next year. And after a year, they will have to raise—and spend—even larger sums of money in a very short time to compete in the official primary election circuit.

So the other effect of the concentrated primaries is that the financial barrier for candidates is higher than ever. In general, only the rich need apply—or perhaps even more pernicious, those who are backed by the rich, since as we know, there are the occasional eccentric progressive billionaires.

In fact, instead of tinkering with the details, we might well reconsider the whole tedious and retrogressive machinery of the primaries, perverse both in principle and in practice. Having begun as a means of freeing politics from the smoke-filled rooms of the party machines, they have become the method by which hugely expensive rubber-chicken-filled banqueting rooms dominate politics. It is through the primaries that big money gets most leverage in the political process. A candidate as an individual rather than a party organization has to raise huge amounts of money for a primary election.