Ask Lemmy

AskLemmy is not the right community for US politics. Locking.

Only two parties.

The electoral college nonsense (only thing that should matter is the number of votes).

Voting restrictions (if you are a citizen, you should be able to vote).

Not making election day a national holiday

The weird thing is that the loser must acknowledge his loss, and the other's win.

This looks like they don't know the results for sure, but instead the candidates have the power to interpret the results (which they really should not have)

Unthinkable where the count of votes is an absolute, a well-known number.

This was a great question btw.

First past the post. Electorate college. Overrepresentation of smaller States. Gerrymandering. PACs.

And thats just the ones that pop up immediately. For calling yourself a democracy, your system is quite rigged.

Literally everything.

Maybe I'm just used to my comfortable parliamentary democracy.

You vote for your representative. Whichever party gets the most representatives gets power. It's either a majority (meaning that they can do whatever they want because they got more representatives than all the other parties combined) or it's a minority (meaning that to pursue their agenda they'll need to cooperate and negotiate with the other parties because they don't have enough representatives to do it themselves)

The leader of that ruling party becomes Prime Minister. He holds less power than a president because in reality he's just the Prime Minister (First Minister among many) but he has more authority than the leaders of the other parties who didn't win.

It just seems so simple compared to the lunacy to my south.

The entire system is alien to me, with the districts and the electoral college and (...)

It's so -- Simple -- Here.

WELL

At least presidential choice is simple here, the legislative houses are their own beast.

But yeah here it's just: Each (properly registered, though registration can be done through the internet) adult person gets one vote, if a candidate gets 50%+1 they are in, if none manage to get that there is a run-off round with the top 2 or 3 candidates.

Over there it's like people from certain states have their votes be worth more than people from other states, and then there's the whole "winning the district" thing and the whole idea of red/blue/swing states. So much complexity.

The shear length of the campaigns has got to be the weirdest thing for me. But it does make good material for the late night shows.

We have a checkbox on our income tax forms so registering to vote is very easy.

• the money involved. someone with no financial backing will have a hard time campaigning. and with mostly private news and entertainment channels, good luck with that.

• separation of church and state, yet you see someone with this "faith council" and church endorsements. i guess, i think there should be some sort of commission to lay down rules and enforce them.

• debates and fact checking, i don't get why fact checking isn't allowed on an event that is supposed to inform people and help them decide.

Many many things, but one I've not seen touched on much is how LONG the lead up is.

Here, quite often they announce an election and then a few weeks later we have the election.

It doesn't really make any sense to drag it out, that's more than enough time to learn about the candidates, the current state of the various parties and their manifestos, and time for debates and discussions and such before polling day.

The idea that an election run up can go on for months and months and months feels silly/wasteful.

Some things come to mind:

• Each state could theoretically name a different candidate (all that primaries bullshit)
• No unified federal law for voting for the fucking president; each state has different voting laws
• Parties have to be registered at a state level and ONLY Rep and Dem exist on all 50. What the fucking fuck
• Unlimited money spending
• The fucking electoral college. Winner takes the whole state.
• Election on tuesday (if i recall, that's a leftover of ye olde times because it's when rural people were more likely to be around cities)

'muricans somehow insist they are a democracy despite all the hurdles, weird laws and obvious gatekeeping that make it a very shitty republic where votes are NOT equal.

For comparison, Brazil's elections for president and state governors happen on the same year/day (also for some senators and federal deputies, but let's focus on president). It's direct vote counting, majority (50% + 1) wins. If no candidate gets more than half total votes, the 2 better voted candidates go to a 2nd turn, which happens 4 weeks after the 1st. Election happens on a sunday and there's an electoral tribunal that handles all the logistics across all 27 states.

Regarding expenditure, it took us a while to stop allowing corporations to finance candidates' campaigns (thanks in no small part to a supreme judge who wanted to keep that legal), the downside is that candidates with rich "friends"/families still have a significant advantage, since direct individual donations are still allowed.

The insistence on electoral districts.

You get that across the English-speaking world, though. The really weird thing is that even people who see the problem want to keep the districts and argue for non-solutions like ranked-choice voting.

Centuries ago, it made sense. Communities chose one of their own to argue for their interests in front of the king. Which communities had the privilege? Obviously that's up to the king to decide. Before modern communication tech, it also made sense that communities would be defined by geography.

Little of that makes sense anymore. When their candidate loses, people don't feel like the 2nd best guy is representing them. They feel disenfranchised.

It used to be, in the US, that minorities - specifically African Americans - were denied representation. Today, census data is used to draw districts dominated by minority ethnic groups so that they can send one of their own to congress. This might not be a good thing, because candidates elsewhere do not have to appeal to these minorities or take their interests into account. Minorities that are not geographically concentrated - eg LGBTQ - cannot gain representation that way.

The process is entirely top-down and undemocratic. Of course, it is gamed.

Aside from that, the mere fact that representation is geography based influences which issues dominate. The more likely you are to move before the next election, the less your interests matter. That goes for both parties. But you can also see a pronounced urban/rural divide in party preference. Rural vs urban determines interests and opinions in very basic ways. Say, guns: High-population density makes them a dangerous threat and not much else. In the country, they are a tool for hunting.

That we allow one party to use disenfranchising legitimate voters as a election strategy. It's always one party.