Early voting ends tomorrow, and the party primary will take place Tuesday. So you have at least two more chances (maybe three, depending on what time you're reading this on Wednesday) to cast your vote.

You may or may not have a favorite candidate. You may be excited, or you may have to cast your vote while holding your nose. But it's important to participate, regardless.

I, for one, don't really like our current system of presidential primaries. It places too much emphasis on a few early states, giving them an unfairly large role in the process. Running a presidential campaign is so expensive now that if you do poorly in the first few primaries, you will lose fund-raising support and will find it much harder to carry on through the process and try to catch up.

The national media, of course, also carries some of the blame. We reporters tend to be storytellers, and it's easy, without realizing it, to start casting things in terms of a story (David vs. Goliath, new generation vs. old veteran, or what have you) and focus on whoever are perceived to be the leading two or three candidates, giving short shrift to the also-rans before the voters have had the opportunity to consider all of them fully.

Some states have tried to counter the Iowa-and-New-Hampshire effect by trying to move their own primaries up, earlier and earlier in the year. But it doesn't seem to have changed anything, and in a few cases states have been penalized by the party organizations for changing the date of their primary without permission.

The other bad thing about the primary process is that the list of active candidates changes so quickly that ballots are out of date by Election Day. If you went in on the first day of early voting -- Jan. 16 -- and cast your ballot for Fred Thompson in the Republican primary or Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primary, you may now feel that you've wasted your vote, since both men have dropped out of the race since that time. Some people will look at the long list of candidates on Election Day and have no idea which ones are still actively campaigning and which ones have dropped out.

Then again, I've heard about some Tennesseans who intend to vote for Thompson anyway, either as a statement in support of his policies, or because he's a "favorite son" candidate, or because they want to send his particular roster of delegates to the GOP convention.

Some people, over the years, have discussed regional primaries -- say, a southeastern primary one week, a southwestern primary the next, and so on. But that would still give one region or another the first chance to make a statement.

But a nationwide primary would have its drawbacks as well. In a crowded race like this year's, no candidate is likely to get a majority of the vote, so you'd have a party nominee based on a plurality rather than a majority. That's not a good idea, and it would leave a door open for candidates with extremist views on either end of the spectrum.

Perhaps you could have two nationwide party primaries -- one in March, to narrow the field down to two candidates, and a second in July or August, to choose the final nominee. Under this system, you would do away with the party conventions, at least in their current form. In Tennessee, at least, our existing election schedule could easily be modified to fit that, without requiring any new election dates.

I don't have much hope that the presidential primary system will actually be changed, any more than I have hope that the electoral college system will be changed. But it's interesting to talk about.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.