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.
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
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…
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.
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.
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 ;)
When I see how some of our politicians can run away from justice, it isn’t that weird.
But our justice system is truly independent from the political one.
True your two remarks.
And we also have a few very questionable representatives/candidate to whatever elections around here, but so far none that has managed to get away from a failed coup at the previous election — sorry, it was unintentional but I may have hinted at the candidate I was surprised was still able to run tor presidency ;)
There are some regrettable exceptions
Why would you get down voted for that on a leftist forum?
There’s a downvote bot, sometimes people click the wrong button by accident, and this community is not leftist
I like your optimism that by naming said candidate you would influence anyone!
Maybe I was a little bit sarcastic?
Woah, tone down that rhetoric, Yosif!
/s
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.
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.
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.
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.
the money!
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.
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
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.
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.
Ah, so it’s a ‘you voted wrong’ safeguard. :|
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.
The rallies, with celebrities and stuff. Bizarre.
Everything in America is a circus.
That they’re held on a work-day, to disenfranchise those that can’t take the day off.
Isn’t that quite normal even in other countries? I believe we do it quite commonly in Denmark.
Yes. In the UK, our elections are always on Thursdays. No one has ever complained about it because it’s literally not an issue.
The idea that it’s an attempt at disenfranchising people because you have to vote either before or after work is laughable.
The difference I suspect is in the ease of which we have access to local polling stations within walking distance of our homes, and how short the queues are, if there are queues at all.
In the US these problems can be magnified, especially if everybody is trying to pile in to the stations (or just reach them) within the one hour they have before their 12 hour shift, etc.
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”.
