I like on-line paper submission a lot. But I’m worried that the rigid selection rules ASA has imposed along with the on-line system are dysfunctional, specifically that a paper can only be seen by the organizer to whom it has been submitted and that organizer of choice #2 only sees the paper if organizer of choice #1 rejects it. Back in the bad old days, we had to deal with boxes and boxes of paper — I got several hundred submissions one year — and we had to mail all those papers on to the roundtable organizers when we were done with them. I’m happy to be past that. But the organizers of the “regular” and “section” sessions in my area would work together, pulling papers from both submission piles to create the best possible groupings of papers into sessions. And an organizer who had obviously meritorious papers that s/he could not use would call other organizers to see if they had come up short on papers and would like an extra, or an organizer who did not have enough good submissions would call around to see if there were good papers out there s/he could pick up. No quality controls forced papers to be put into the sessions to which they had been submitted, although I always tried to check with an author before moving a paper to a totally different session topic than they’d submitted to. There is always tremendous unevenness in how many papers each session organizer receives. It seems likely that ASA’s rigid rules have increased the likelihood that papers on closely related topics are scattered across different sessions. And have introduced more random noise than there already was into the relation between the merits of the paper and its chances of being accepted. This is my first year being a session organizer under the new system, so I don’t know if these suspicions are correct. Does anybody else have a sense of perspective about this?