For me it is the concept of registering to vote. I am citizen so I have the right to vote automatically and only thing I need to provide is some accepted ID.
If nobody reaches 270 electoral votes, rather than having a second round, the congress decides who wins. FPTP in general. And that most states would give all electoral votes to a candidate with 51% of the vote.
51%? 50% + 1 vote!
Afaik just a plurality can be enough
Yeah, technically the person with the most votes wins but I was just saying that 50% + 1 voice guarantees a win.
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The electrical college was, as I understand it, originally installed in the event the population voted really, really stupidly - to avoid the “tyranny of the majority.” If course that’s not actually how it works. It’s a dead theory and the whole process should be kicked off a cliff and replace with some kind of ranked choice system. At the federal level, if nothing else.
If the electoral college had worked as intended, Trump would not have won in 2016*.
So, yeah, get rid of it. It’s not working anyway.
- You could, of course, consider the attitudes and biases of the founding fathers and come to the conclusion that they would have preferred to see a man win instead of a woman. However, I don’t think that’s fair. Even in their lifetimes they were shifting their views based on their experiences. If you are going to ask them what they would do today, then you have to give them the benefit of having experienced the events of the last 248 years. You have to assume they would have continued to grow.
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The rallies, with celebrities and stuff. Bizarre.
Everything in America is a circus.
The fucking shows your politicians put on. Like going places and then having some monologue in front of a bunch of people. Not even a debate or something… Weird as fuck to me.
No voter ID is super weird to me as a Canadian.
We can vote without ID in Canada, we need to swear that we are who we are.
The PACs. I think this practice should be considered blatant corruption in any democratic system as it enables large corporations and wealthy individuals to predetermine which candidate or party has even the slightest chance in elections. In my home country, of course, there are private political funds as well but those are not nearly as important in our system as there is solid public funding for political parties based on past election results. I might be wrong but I always thought that the insane amount of private money that fuels US elections boils down to the US being a plutocracy rather than a democracy.
AskLemmy is not the right community for US politics. Locking.
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FPTP voting system
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Voting isn’t compulsory so a lot depends upon on riling up your base
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Voting is on a Tuesday instead of a weekend (or a public holiday)
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Political parties draw up the electoral boundaries instead of an independent body
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The absurdly long leadup to an election
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The amount of money thrown around
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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
That campaigning starts over a year in advance… then you don’t even have a switchover for two months.
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.
Also, before election day, the government is dissolved and the winners immediately assume office after. No lame duck period
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.
