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Being registered "as a republican/democrat" is weird.
Electoral college is weird AF
One party trying to stop people voting is weird.
Queuing for hours to vote is weird.
Purging voter rolls is weird.
Rallies are weird.
Townhalls are weird.
Flags everywhere is weird.
The orange one is super weird.
Electoral college is weird AF
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0065
It was just added because it was the only way to launder slave votes for slave states, if you did it 1 vote per person then who got to choose who the slaves voted for?
We need to fix it, but there's no way in hell they'll give up their most precious possession, no matter how wrong it is.
That might have been revolutionary in 1776, and cut it in 1950, but its the 21st C — as long as the electoral college exists the US should not be viewed as more than a pseudo-democracy at best.
Electoral college is weird AF
I think it's less unique than people think. In France, there is an electoral college specifically for the Sénat, which is a secondary legislative chamber compared to the Assemblée Nationale. They can amend law proposals after they are submitted by the Assemblée, but in case of conflicts, it's the Assemblée that decides.
The college is made of people locally elected in various types of previous local elections. I think part of the reasons for this system is to have a representation of every locations that is not only proportional to the population. For example to prevent populated areas from dictating laws to unpopulated areas that don't make sense for their local circumstances (typically around urbanism and transportation).
It may make sense for specific services which are naturally bias and unfair (can't think of any that would warrant it), but for general governance weighting citizens votes differently for any reason is entirely anti-democratic.
Also the UK's House of Lords is no better. Giving a bunch of historically elite landowners authority based on wealth and birthright is fucking disgusting.
Electoral college is fucking weird
That you disallow prisoners to vote, but a felon can run as a candidate
That you end up in situation where there are hours long lines and you don't have one station per, say, 1000 people at most
Registering to vote is weird, but that is i understand mostly a consequence of not having countrywide ID standard. In my country you're automatically registered where you live, and IDs are free of charge and mandatory to have (not driving license or passport. there are fees for these)
Election isn't on weekend, there's zero reason why it couldn't be or it could be made national holiday. There was even free public transit for election day in my city, but that one was paid by the city
That some of people (republicans) seem to be into politics in the same way ultras seem to be into football, it's still fucked up but i've seen it in other places so it's not that weird by now
That you end up in situation where there are hours long lines and you don't have one station per, say, 1000 people at most
If you make it hard for the people you don't like to vote, then they won't vote. You never hear about rich white districts running low on election machines do you. Since the machines are provided by the state I wonder why that would be. 🤔
I am not American, but I believe the reason a felon can run is that the founding fathers didn’t want peoples political rivals to be able to bring charges to stop someone being president.
And how does that handle a candidate who is in prison, and how is it different?
Eugene Debs, the must successful American socialist candidate for president, was at one point running for office while in prison. Of course he lost so I can't imagine it helped
but a felon can run as a candidate
No no this one is one of the good ideas in the American system. In dictatorships this sort of restriction can be and is used as a way to prevent political rivers from running for office.
Non US citizens, what's the weirdest thing about USA elections, compared to elections in your country?
I will probably get downvoted to oblivion for that but here it is: that one of your candidate was not put in jail already and is still legally able to run for presidency (note that I did not name said candidate, I would not want to influence US voters ;)
I like your optimism that by naming said candidate you would influence anyone!
That they're held on a work-day, to disenfranchise those that can't take the day off.
I mean yes, but the real disenfranchisement comes from making sure the lines are hours long for the only polling station in your county (while every suburban school is a polling station in rich neighborhoods).
We had laws against that (not that they were followed), but the Supreme Court struck them down because "they weren't needed anymore".
FPTP voting system
Voting isn't compulsory so a lot depends upon on riling up your base
Voting is on a Tuesday instead of a weekend (or a public holiday)
Political parties draw up the electoral boundaries instead of an independent body
The absurdly long leadup to an election
The amount of money thrown around
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.
Gerrymandering. i dont know a second democracy where such a blatant version of voter suppression is allowed.
Singapore
61% of the votes, but 89% of the seats in parliament
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.
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
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.
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.
The entire process of the electoral college makes no sense at all. The only thing it accomplishes is making some peoples votes better than others. Which is so fucked up if you think about it.
That one party (the Republicans, just to be clear about that) tries to invalidate votes and tries to make voting as hard as possible AND THEN gets away with it.
That for the last 8 years one party keeps nominating a criminal who keeps admitting that he wants to fuck the country into the dirt. And people still vote for him. Every country has its idiots, but they usually are in the 5%-10% range. In the US it's almost 50% of the voters. That is remarkable.
Oh, and the two party system sucks, too. They are not the same, fuck everyone who says they are. But it still does suck.
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.
Some things come to mind:
'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.
That we allow one party to use disenfranchising legitimate voters as a election strategy. It's always one party.
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.
This but also that in some US states you don't need a valid ID to vote
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 fact that there is a chance that the fascist will lose. Unimaginable in Russia.
The rallies, with celebrities and stuff. Bizarre.
Everything in America is a circus.
I wouldn't know where to start. Maybe the electoral college and that nobody updated this in centuries. Makes it borderline undemocratic IMO. Especially the winner-takes-it-all formula that makes you have exactly 2 parties, with none of them really incentivised to do what the citizens want. At least on a national level. And the people can choose to either vote for one of them, whether they like them or not, or throw away their vote.
And the next thing are maybe the people themselves. I can't imagine how half a population would like a convicted criminal, who'd like to make everything more expensive for them and doesn't like democracy (which is kinda something the USA is proud of, historically) and would like to get rid of it. Which is completely detrimental to how and why the entire country was founded. And I mean you kind of have to be a racist yourself to like other fascists/racists? Or have some pretty severe issues in your life. I can imagine like 20-30% of racists around, or people who've been fooled by some charismatic character. But not half.
Everything being voted on at once even if it means that the States have control over the federal elections, that's weird as fuck to me... In Canada provinces handle their elections, cities handle their elections (although they might all have to hold them on the same day depending on provincial laws), the federal government handles its own elections.
Numbers starting coming out before all polling stations are closed is also stupid.
The first one makes more sense when you realize that America was originally supposed to be somewhere between one large state and X independent states in an EU-style union. Presidential elections are the federal government asking the states who they want to be president and the states then asking the people (technically they don't have to do that part AFAIK). It's weird but internally consistent at least.
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.
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.
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 money!
That campaigning starts over a year in advance... then you don't even have a switchover for two months.
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.