Non US citizens, what's the weirdest thing about USA elections, compared to elections in your country?
Non US citizens, what's the weirdest thing about USA elections, compared to elections in your country?
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.
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.
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.
It's so openly biased to cater to capital, not human beings. And everyone seems proud of that.
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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 money!
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 ;)
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.
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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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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.
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.
The fact that there is a chance that the fascist will lose. Unimaginable in Russia.
That campaigning starts over a year in advance... then you don't even have a switchover for two months.
The way people get so emotionally invested into it.
