I was reading the comments to the Wil Wheaton article on the election that James posted last week. One of Wil's readers suggested that we:

institute a March Madness process -- brackets and all. Start with 64 candidates and start eliminating them until we reach the Final Four and nominate those for the major parties for the top 2 spots.

I've been thinking about this idea for the past week and wondering how we could make it work. First, I wouldn't stop at the Final Four. If you're going to have brackets, then you should go all the way.

To me, the biggest question is how you would seed all of the candidates. Would you run an initial poll and seed them 1-64 based on the results? Would you try to create four "regions" that represent different political philosophies?

What I would do is seed the top 16 candidates based on early polling results and then randomly fill in the rest of the field. I'd place the top 16 in the field in such a way so that similar candidates would end up in the same region. That way the Final Four would have some diversity of ideas, but it wouldn't allow for a crazy fringe candidate to make it to the end just because they're only competing with other crazy fringe candidates.

The best part of this idea is how well it would work with my mandatory debate proposal - every matchup is proceeded by a one-on-one debate!

So what do you think? Will America vote, or just participate in office pools? Who will be the bracket buster? How will Dick Vitale get involved?