Liberty Candidate 2012
Who knows how the 2008 election will play out. It's certainly not too early to start looking at 2012.
An important thing for 2012 will be for us to not split up our efforts between multiple candidates (it's easy to forsee many debates on the "Ron Paul candidate" of 2012, just look at all of the debates over whom should be Ron Paul's VP).
So, here's my idea: We create a PAC that will take $100 per vote (up to the max contribution), we hold an election in spring of 2011 and then send people their money back in the hopes that they will then donate that money to the winning candidate.
Why not keep that money as a PAC? A PAC cannot donate to a candidate, but thousands of donors can.
Why not just have everyone sign up and sign some pledge to have the vote? Because anyone can sign up for some online petition and not have it mean anything.
This PAC would give the potential candidate a good idea of how much money he can expect to raise right away. Most candidates feel things out to see how much they'll be able to raise when determining whether or not they'll run. It would be hard to feel out how much the grassroots would be willing to contribute. This would give them that answer.
A sort of primary before the primary...so we don't split the liberty vote between multiple candidates.
The sooner we begin, the larger the coffers we can acquire.
Two runner up votes
Ok, I had an idea for how we would keep things interesting early on...
2 years before the actual vote we can have people who donate vote on voting method, condorcet (the voting method used to choose NH as the Free State), highest vote total, or someone is required to have at least 50% (like how the LP determines their candidates).
1 year before the actual vote we narrow the candidates down to a top ten candidates supplied by the donors.
http://NoOneButPaul.com