Maybe I saw too many membership forms filled out for newly minted Liberals who were barely aware they were joining a party. Too much cash passed under the table to pay convention fees for people who had no interest in paying their own way. Too many organizers enlisting friends, acquaintances, entire ethnic communities -- people who couldn't care less about politics, but owed a favour. Too many riding associations run as MPs' personal fiefdoms.

Maybe I just spent too much time in the Liberal party. But even with all the added scrutiny, the new fundraising rules, the claims that the party has turned a new leaf, I'm having trouble believing the race to replace Paul Martin is all totally above board.

For those who haven't been involved in partisan politics, let's consider a couple of scenarios.

Suppose that, this December, you find a thousand dollars. You might spend it on Christmas gifts, or put it toward a vacation somewhere warm. You could go out for a decadent night on the town, or stash it away for a rainy day. But what you won't do, unless you're very rich or very insane, is hand it over to the Liberal party for the privilege of casting a vote for one of its 11 leadership candidates.

Now suppose you've been following a leadership race in which Joe Volpe has become a national laughingstock. You're randomly approached by a Volpe organizer asking you to spend $10 to join the party for the express purpose of supporting his guy. Are you so impressed by a candidate best known for his child donors that you sign on the dotted line?

These are the conceits that the Liberal race relies upon. We're to believe that, aside from those who've launched their own local fundraising efforts or been subsidized by their riding associations, delegates will be paying their own way to the party's Montreal convention -- not just the $995 delegate fee, but hotel and maybe travel as well. Even more implausibly, we're to believe that thousands upon thousands of people have taken it upon themselves to become members so they can support Volpe -- 35,000 of them, by the Volpe camp's count, even though organizers for more attractive candidates (i.e., all other candidates) admit it's hard to get people to buy Liberal memberships these days for any reason.

More broadly, we're to believe this is a new sort of leadership race -- one in which covert payments and mass sign-ups have been rendered a thing of the past.

Party officials want to believe this, and many are doing their best to make it so. The same probably goes for many of the candidates themselves. And to some extent, this is a cleaner campaign than those of the past -- partly because under the new fundraising rules, campaigns don't have deep enough coffers to do the things they used to do.

But in this country, leadership campaigns -- especially those that revolve around delegated conventions -- are inherently sketchy. This is not purely a Liberal thing; Tories and New Democrats have been in the same boat. It's the nature of the beast.

Much as they make for good TV, the conventions themselves are more about horse-trading than the democratic process -- Candidate A buying a flock of second-ballot votes by promising to pick up Candidate B's campaign expenses, or offering him a future Cabinet posting. And what goes on before then -- a small number of party workers trying to ensure that hundreds of thousands of membership forms are legit, that all money is being spent transparently and that every riding is running its delegate selection process properly -- borders on the farcical.

The popular solution is to move to a one-member, one-vote system, of the sort used by the Conservatives. But even that doesn't go far enough. Because it still revolves around mass sign-ups, it's prone to many of the same abuses.

To really achieve clean leadership campaigns, along with fair nomination races for local candidates, would require an overhaul of our entire concept of party membership. Rather than sending out recruiters with stacks of membership forms to try to collect (or pretend to collect) $10 fees, we would need to shift to something closer to the American model. In other words, give every voter the option of registering for the party of their choice, and hand every registered Liberal, Conservative or New Democrat a vote in their respective parties' leaderships or nominations.

It won't happen, because no party's MPs will vote for it -- not when it means transferring so much power from the elites to the common folk. But it's the only way that we'll ever really clean up party politics.