People from potato-picking, big-sky states like Idaho and Wyoming always defend the ludicrous system currently in use on the grounds that it allows voters in underpopulated areas to have some influence over the selection of candidates and issues. It is the only reason you hear major national politicians kowtowing to Iowa farmers about ethanol, and the only reason they set foot in New Hampshire at all.

But this line of reasoning is absurd. The first and most obvious reason is that people in big, important states like Pennsylvania should get to make big, important decisions ... like who runs for president and who wins the presidency. If ski bunnies in Vermont and farmers in Nebraska want a bigger voice in which corrupt politician gets sent to Washington, they should consider moving to states where you don't have to drive 50 miles to see a movie.

So while the denizens of one of America's most underachieving public education systems in New Hampshire get to meet and greet candidates, the voters in states that will actually decide the presidential election in November end up partially or completely marginalized. Democrats in strategically vital Pennsylvania and New Jersey were among the worst-off in 2004, with New Jersey relegated to mop-up duty on June 8. This is like voting in the presidential election in February, after it's already, you know, over.

And by the time the Pennsylvania primary rolled around in late April of 2004, Kerry was the sealed-and-delivered candidate. Most of the others had either withdrawn or were no longer actively campaigning. Kerry had officially rolled up the nomination on March 11, nearly three months before Pennsylvania voters had the chance to vote. CNN even stopped tallying the delegates on its Web site.

And in reality, Mr. Charisma had the whole thing more or less locked down even before March, after his unexpected January victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. And so when fewer than a million Pennsylvania Democrats bothered to vote in the primary, they bowed to the inevitable by awarding Kerry 585,683 votes to Howard Dean's 79,799. Those are the kinds of numbers you expect to find in decaying Stalinist tyrannies like Uzbekistan and Texas, not in an advanced democracy.

Not that any such movement is afoot, but elites in these little states would surely fight any move toward a national primary. The most important thing to remember if the Democrats ever pick such a fight is that elites in Montana and Delaware are not very important people. They are precisely the sort of people with whom we ought to be picking fights. If you stand two politicians side by side, one of them from Rhode Island and one of them from California, you can make a lot of money betting the one from the Golden State is a much bigger VIP.

The only sensible solution to this dilemma is to hold all the primaries on the same day. It would prevent tiny states from having oversized importance in the process without silencing their voices. It would also be the only true test of a candidate's national appeal before the general election. That kind of test might have come in handy in 2004, when Democrats discovered with belated horror that Kerry played about as well in Tennessee as hardcore porn plays in Riyadh.

I know this would come as a disappointment to loyal Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire. They have put their low-population-density hearts and their one-stoplight souls into the primaries, pressing the flesh and giving quaint quotes to national reporters awestruck at the spectacle of small-town democracy. If you, as a big-hearted Pennsylvanian, feel remorse about removing these people from the national spotlight, just remember: You're more important than they are.

David Faris is a graduate student at Penn.