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.
AskLemmy is not the right community for US politics. Locking.
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.
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
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 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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Some states actually split the electoral college vote. Us elections are truly bonkers
https://electoralvotemap.com/which-states-split-their-electoral-votes/
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.
That we allow one party to use disenfranchising legitimate voters as a election strategy. It’s always one party.
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.
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.
The weirdest thing, the thing that I have the hardest time understanding, is how many people vote for Trump. There was just a survey here in Denmark asking how many would vote for Trump. It was 8%. That number I still find a bit high but I can understand it a little bit. 8% of people voting for something very harmful seems almost inevitable I guess. Some people just aren’t educated or informed enough.
But the fact that close to 50% of americans choose to vote for Trump, and that in some states, it is even more than 50% - that I don’t think I will ever understand. That is madness.
Some people just aren’t educated or informed enough.
There’s a lot in your guess. Look at a map of the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states: the Atlantic and Pacific coasts are not red, but the ‘inner’ states. These people hardly know that the countries outside really exist.
I think his main “selling point” that’s a bit unique to the US is his hard stance on the southern border. Too many white people are afraid of us becoming another Latino/Hispanic country.
Ikr? Feels like they are aggressively breeding sociopaths over there.
They are. The Republican playbook in every state is to slash education funding, make abortion and birth control as hard to access as possible and then wait 20-30y for a big poorly educated population to grow that they can control easily with media and the Jesus
It’s much less than 50%. 2020 had the highest percentage of eligible voters actually vote in US history, it was about 67%. About 70% of Americans are eligible to vote and of that 70% about a third voted for Biden, about a third for Trump, and about a third didn’t vote. So a little over 20% of Americans chose to vote for Trump last time. That number is still too damn high but it’s not as bad as half.
That just makes me think, how can those people not voting just sit idly by and watch? I don’t understand that either.
Some people are genuinely apathetic or feel like it doesn’t directly impact their life, but a lot of people fall for the propaganda of “both sides are the same” and that it makes no difference either way, and a lot of people are intentionally disenfranchised by various voter suppression efforts by Republicans. Then there’s the electoral college nonsense which leaves the populace of 43 states with essentially no say in who the president is, leading some to wonder why they should bother, not being mindful that their vote may carry weight for the federal legislature and state/local elections. And many people are just too busy surviving to worry about anything else.
For my part, voting straight Democrat in a heavily Republican-leaning state, my vote literally means nothing at all because my state will inevitably give all of its electoral college votes to Trump, and will elect nothing but Republicans to the federal legislature and for almost all state/local offices. But I voted on the first day of early voting, and I will vote in every election, because we have to show support for change if we ever want there to be change. There are enough left-leaning people in my state for it to be a swing state (hell, we had a Democrat for governor 2003-2011, and he was popular), but so many see their votes as meaningless simply because their fellow left-leaners also aren’t voting…
-
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.
-
Indirect voting? Why would I trust my vote to someone else claiming they will honour my choice.
Edit: also gerrymandering, registering to vote, not having the election on a holiday so everyone has a chance to vote, candidates for presidents being voted for before the vote??
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.
Ah, so it’s a ‘you voted wrong’ safeguard. :|
