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The 2008 primary election process has clearly been unfair to conservative candidates,

I don't agree. The most conservative candidates were not good candidates. They also failed to do well in the "non-voting" early primary consisting of fundraising and endorsements. They had the weakest resumes for the job. Hunter was Congressman, for gods sake! When was the last time we selected a Congressman for our nominee.

and here's why. Several liberal and moderate/independent states chose to hold their primary elections and caucuses early, all wanting to be first — so they said.

Do you really think that the results would have been different if some other state went first. Every state has build in bias's. Perhaps Tennessee should have gone first? Not fair to McCain. Toss out Arizona, California, New Hamphshire....

But look at what has happened as a result. Conservative candidates like Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter have been drummed out of the race by breaking their bank accounts in non conservative states before the rest of the country ever had a chance to vote for them. Is this what we call "fair and democratic elections"?

That's just an excuse! Maybe it could happen like you say, but it DIDN'T. Hunter was never in the race to win, and Thompson ran an uninspiring campaign. He entered late, wasn't in a bunch of critical debates, put in little time on the ground in the early states. Basically he looked like he wanted to be coronated.

These are supposed to be national elections, not independent state elections.

WAIT A SECOND! I thought you said you were a Conservative?? Aren't we honoring the original design of a Union of Sovereign States? Perhaps you need a refresher course on the US Constitution. The election of the President is a series of State races, not one big popular vote. It is, by design, not a "national election". The primary process mimicks this for a very good reason.

By allowing some states to hold primaries before others gives those states the advantage to propel or retard the individual campaigns depending on the political landscape of those few states.

Well yes but the early states are not all the same, and they are not all big states, either. Iowa and New Hampshire are "retail" states and candidates don't need big cash to compete in them like they would in New York, Texas or California.

As we are now seeing, when liberal and moderate states hold early elections, conservative candidates have no chance of ever making it into the general election or winning the presidency.

Whhaaa. My candidate didn't win. OK, Utah is the most conservative state. So they should go first. Would that have helped Fred?

If we are ever again to have fair elections in this country,

Oh, please. Grow up. You sound like a Move On.Org leftist. The elections were fair. You don't like the sequencing of them, ok, I get that. But still no one has really come up with a better plan, nor a way to implement it. You are now going to propose a really bad one, I can feel it.

then primary elections are going to have to be standardized and held on the same day in all states,

Horrible plan. So the winner of the Everything Tuesday will be the person who the media likes the most, I guess. You'd take power away from voters and give it to ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN/PBS/FOX and the NY Times. Because excepting Billionaires (a group who would love your plan) who is going to buy ads nationwide to get their story out? NO ONE. Kiss goodbye someone like Huckabee getting anywhere in that race. Hello President Rudy or McCain in this election. Are those your conservatives?

if everyone is to have a chance to participate in the election process. Everyone DOES get a chance to particpate in the election process. And this year later states are going to be very very important. Super Tuesday is NOT going to pick the Republican nominee. That means the contest moves on to Texas, Washington and eventually maybe even the really late states, like Oregon.

Either that or there is going to have to be a media blackout until everyone has had a chance to vote.

Ok, now your plan is getting REALLY STUPID! Are you going to ammend the Constitution to prohibit newspapers from publishing news about elections for months? That's you 'better' and 'fairer' system? (Sorry about Fred. McCain may be your man after all though.)

Election returns are not allowed to air until the polls are closed. Does it make any sense that we should be seeing election returns from other states before we even have a chance to go to the polls?

Well it makes perfect sense to me. I believe in the Presidential Race the networks have a pledge to not report state results until the polls close. But seeing as it is actually a contest to win electoral votes it makes perfect sense to report results by state. I guess under your poorly defined "national primary" we'd all vote on the same day, but we're still voting state by state for our state reps. Or do you also intend to do away with delegates and just select the winner of the popular vote? What if it's split?

I don't want a few small states deciding who we can vote for in the party primary elections.

I don't want you designing the primary system for 50 states. Stick to fixing the one where you live if you are really upset about it.

We hear so much about voter disenfranchisement these days but nobody is talking about the disenfranchisement of conservatives to vote for candidates who share their views.

The Uber-Conservatives didn't have a good candidate. You had a Congressman and a sleepy ex-senator. Find better candidates. Uber-Conservatives don't tend to be the best candidates for the GOP anyway, either. Goldwater was a pillar of conservative values and got crushed by LBJ.

American politics takes place between the 40 yard lines. The more extreme left and right wingers are always going to be disapointed. Edwards is losing (the more left of the three main Dems). Kucinich never got started. He was like the Duncan Hunter of the Donks. Very true to his super-liberal beliefs. A Congress-critter.

Most Americans are not ideologues and they want to vote for a moderate Governor for POTUS, not some back bench ideologue. That's why Newt never made it very far, despite the hype.

If your favorite candidate is purged from the race early, then where is your right to vote for the candidate of your choice?

Geeze. Life isn't perfect, you know. You have a right to vote, not a right to have the person you absolutely think is the best have a statistically even chance of winning the election. It is a rough and tumble system that rewards, uh, smart politicians.

This year we have seen the largest disenfranchisement of voters in history, and they are all conservatives.

There you go with your MoveOn rhetoric again. "Disenfranchisement" means someone prevents you from voting. No one is preventing anyone from voting (or caucusing). Stop misusing language. You are complaining that your favorite candidates didn't do well in the early primary states. OK. Sorry. That is not the moral equivilent of Bull Conner using dogs and firehoses to keep Conservatives away from the polls.

BTW: New Hampshire is the most Conservative state in New England, by far. It sends Republicans to Congress, it elects Republican Governors and went for Bush in 2000. So there are a lot of Conservatives there. The top vote getter in New Hampshire only got 25% or so this year. Seems to me that if ALL THE CONSERVATIVES felt strongly about this they could easily have put their man in the top, or near the top. Instead, rather obviously, Conservatives split along lines of what is important to them.

Did this occur by chance, or was it planned from the start? Considering the ambitions of George Soros and Billary Clinton to gain and hold power over the country by any means necessary, by hook or by crook, I can't dismiss the possibility that this was no accident.

Geeze! Now I'm thinking you should vote for Ron Paul! Get real, OK? New Hampshire and Iowa have been at the start of the process for 30 years. It has NOTHING to do with Soros or Clinton. The New Hampshire legislature (as elected by the people of New Hampshire) are very very jealous of their 'first in the nation' status and passed a law that requires the Sec. of State to move the primary date to whenever it has to be to make it first. Clever, eh?

Yet the Republican leadership will never challenge the legitimacy of elections

You are far off the deep end. Like your claim of "disenfranchisement' you are casting at straws. The elections are legitimate because they have been set up by the many State GOP Parties, and conducted in a free and fair manner. You want "equality of outcome" or something. To start saying the elections are illegitimate because they were not sequenced in such as way as to favor Graybeard58s definition of Conservative is absurd.

or the likelihood of voter fraud on the part of the Democrats.What are you talking about? Voter fraud? I have not heard it credibly alleged by anyone in this election, except perhaps at the Democratic Caucus's in Nevada. You remind me of the Democrats who insisted that Bush winning in 2004 was proof the election was rigged, because everyone (at least in Cambridge, Mass) hates Bush and he could not have POSSSIBLY won those votes without cheating.

It's almost as though they are willing parties to election corruption.

My you love to throw charges around. "Election Corruption" consists of New Hampshire having the first primary?

Now the media wants us to think that John McCain is the frontrunner for the Republicans in spite of fact that he is the most liberal Republican in the race.

Ahh, we are moving on to the evil press. O.K. Some in the press do want us to think this, for instance the New York Times just endorsed him. On the other hand Hugh Hewitt has been holding a 3 hour a day talk-a-thon in favor of Romney. Rush kinda/sorta came out for Thompson, too late. Bortz likes Huck because of the Fair Tax proposal, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard seems not to have picked one yet.

McCain will never be elected president, the conservative base simply will not vote for him.

OK, maybe, but so what. We're way off topic. Whether individual A or B will win really isn't connected to charges of disenfranchisement and election fraud. Oh, yeah, most national polls show McCain as the most competitive against eithef of the presumptive nominees on the Donk side. That's one reason that (some, impure) conservatives are leaning his way. But don't let facts get in the way of your preconceptions.

Most of them would rather vote for Ron Paul who may be a conservative alternative on a 3rd party ticket in November, or they will simply not vote at all, just as they did in 2006.

There is little proof of this oft stated (on Free Republic) calumny. Republicans lost because the swing voters swung Dem. Incumbent parties almost always lose off year elections. No big surprise. The various scandals (Cunningham, gay pages, Scooter) didn't help either.

Why go to the polls to vote if no one you like is running?

Influence the course of politics by helping choose from among those on the ballot. On the other hand if all the candidates are unacceptable then it's fine not to vote. Skip that race and vote the others ,or vote the initatives in your state. I know several people who are too "pure" to vote for any real candidate. You may be in that class. Rest assured the rest of us will select a President for you.

The purpose of voting is having your voice heard and counted for the candidate of your choice;

Not really! it's to elect leaders. You are suffering from narcisism. It's not all about you and your voice, even though it might feel that way. It's about the mass of Americans selecting leaders so we can get back to watching football and adding chrome to our motorcycles

not about electing a political party that no longer represents your views.

OK, you've moved on to topic #3 in this tiresome essay. "Why the Republicans are Bad".

We are tired of voting for the lesser of two evils in America.

Vote for Ron Paul then, he is very pure.

What's the point when it's simply six of one, and a half dozen of the other, both choices bad? Voters who feel disenfranchised will simply throw up their hands and say "why bother?" McCain would be preferable to the Clintons or Obama only on the issue of national security. On most other issues, there is virtually little difference.

;Well I doubt McCain is going to be the nominee. There is a lot of difference between what McCain would do and Hillary. Hillary is a self-avowed socialist (er, progressive). Sorry you can't see that. Luckily most Republicans can.

Liberal economic policies have dominated Washington ever since George W. Bush was elected. The government continues to pump worthless money into the economy just like they did this week with the cut in interest rates, which only makes the problem worse. The economy should be controlled by the free market, not the government. This is just another example of the Communism that has been taking over America.

Ahh, Topic #4. The Evil of Fiat Money. Ron Paul is your candidate!! Liberal Economic Policies have dominated Washington since FDR, friend.

Yet, the American voters are still too ignorant to see it and continue voting for these liberals in both parties who are driving the country straight into Communism. The Democrat plan of dumbing down America over the past couple of generations has been successful. It's too late now to re-educate the people, because it has become too widespread. I'm afraid we have already lost the country.

Ok, you go into a long rant about America going Communist here. My suggestion would be to outline your next essay before you write it. This one is all over the place. Also, maybe you should move then, somewhere where the elections are more fair. As you have very dark views of the USA's future. While all these horrors have been going on we've had ANOTHER decade of massive prosperity in the USA.

We have tried to warn them for decades but they wouldn't listen.

Yep, we just keep building stuff and selling it and paying our bills and buying bigger houses, larger TV's to watch the NFL on and more expensive educations for our kis. For decades. It's horrible, really!

With Fred Thompson now out of the race, I'm almost ready to switch my support to Ron Paul and throw them a real turkey. His foreign policy is a disaster but he's a strict constitutionalist and will veto every bill the Congress tries to pass that includes unconstitutional spending, which is just about all of them.

Yes, I thought so. You should, it fits in with your belief that elections are about expressing yourself by voting for the candidate you like the most.

I'm starting to think now that this may be the time for a mass exodus from the Republican party and the right time to form a 3rd party of conservatives, but without the antiwar, anti-defense, blame America first attitude of the Paul Libertarians.

So big government is good for defense, but not for domestic spending?

Conservatives are loyal to their values and beliefs, not to a political party. The Republican Party no longer shares those values and beliefs and no longer deserves the support of conservatives. I will reregister as an independent voter until I see a third party emerge that represents my beliefs. In the meantime, I consider myself just another disenfranchised conservative voter.

Go for it! The Constitution Party and Libertarian Party both seem like they might appeal to you. But maybe not. Start a 4th or 5th Conservative party. Have fun!