There's been a lot of talk about magnetism, personality, celebrity, change.

But, as Steven Hill says in his Washington Post op-ed, is this all gloss and no substance?

Super Tuesday is not the best measure of an honest election. The truth is that there are many states whose delegates are up for grabs today that hold closed primaries on the Democratic side- that is, you must be a registered Democrat to vote in the primary. So if you're an independent, or even a Republican who wants to vote outside your party because, say, there's a candidate whose got you excited about change, you must keep your vote to yourself.

And, as Hill writes, the Republican primary and caucus system isn't much better. Many Republican state primaries use a system where-by the candidate with the highest number of votes gets all of the delegates – even if the candidate wins far less than a majority of the votes. And with no clear front-runner on the Republican side, candidates can easily win all of the delegates by walking away with a small portion of the vote.

What I'm even more interested in, however, is the fact that California has moved to straight paper-ballot voting today. They've kept those electronic voter machines in the warehouse untouched and unused.

With potentially record-breaking voter turnout, especially in California, where so many delegates are up for grabs, decertifying touch-screen voting machines in favor of paper ballots will mean a long night for vote-counters – a very long night. Back in July of 2007, hackers were able to hack into every electronic voting system being tested by the California Secretary of States's office. But in an effort to avoid the "deibold machine fraud" from the 2000 and 2004 elections, California is going back to basics.

We'd all like to think that our vote counts. But there are doubts. For instance, here in Washington state where I live, we're not holding our caucus until Saturday when Democrats will pick all of our delegates and Republicans will pick approximately half. Despite this, we'll still hold a primary a couple of weeks later (on February 19th) for both the Democrats and Republicans.

And caucusing and voting in a primary after Super Tuesday and months of campaign activities on the part of all of the candidates can be frustrating. Residents of Washington state are discussing a small handful of presidential candidates – Democrats and Republicans – because most have already dropped out of the race before any of us have had a chance to have our say or vote!

Finally, let's not forget the fraud perpetrated on the citizens of this country in previous elections. For all of the talk about who is the best candidate to lead this nation, there's been little remembrance that we did pick a qualified candidate back in 2000 to lead our nation – it was Al Gore, Jr.