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.
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
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
I imagine if such a candidate won, the would forfeit their win by not attending the inauguration and not getting sworn in.
Nothing states WHERE the President has to be sworn in. LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One. I believe Andrew Johnson was sworn in at the house where Lincoln lay dying.
Well I don’t really expect someone in prison to win, but I don’t believe there’s any law about the location where the president gets sworn in. If a majority of voters chose that person, they could get sworn in in jail, immediately pardon themselves and off they go.
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. 🤔
Well to be honest we don’t have a justice system - we have a punishment system pretending to be a justice system.
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”.
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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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Gerrymandering. i dont know a second democracy where such a blatant version of voter suppression is allowed.
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.
Having only 2 realistic choices
That’s very common though.
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.
That we allow one party to use disenfranchising legitimate voters as a election strategy. It’s always one party.
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.
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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 fact that there is a chance that the fascist will lose. Unimaginable in Russia.
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.
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
Your signature is your ID.
When you register to vote, your signature is placed on file.
When you go to vote, you sign in and your signature is compared to the registration.
If it matches, you can vote. If it doesn’t match, you can prove who you are or cast a provisional ballot pending identification.
The system seems to work - voting fraud doesn’t seem to be a huge issue in the US.
It’s just that it’s so counterintuitive to me, making sure that everyone voted only once and only in their own name is essential. But somehow you managed to do it without requiring a formal ID document.
I’d think the signature would be way harder to fake than an ID. Nobody signs my name like I do, but I bet there are plenty of bad ID photos that kinda/sorta look like me.
Needing an ID is fine in theory, but in practice many older folks who do not drive do not have one. In order to get one you need a certified birth certificate. In order to get one of those you usually need to deal with a lot of red tape, especially if you were born at home in a rural area.
People often forget how rural the US is. Sometimes it’s hard to document exactly who you are. Especially if you were born poor and black in the South.
The rallies, with celebrities and stuff. Bizarre.
Everything in America is a circus.
