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.
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.
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/
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.
That we allow one party to use disenfranchising legitimate voters as a election strategy. It’s always one party.
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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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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.
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.
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 money!
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
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
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.
Yeah, and for the same reason prisoners should be allowed to vote too
The rivers must run, lest they be dammed.
Oh shit I didn’t notice. As a proud grammar Nazi, I must now commit keppusu.
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
I imagine if such a candidate won, the would forfeit their win by not attending the inauguration and not getting sworn in.
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.
Well to be honest we don’t have a justice system - we have a punishment system pretending to be a justice system.
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.
FYI registering with a party affiliation is so you can vote in their closed primary election (where they pick candidates to run in the general election)
Anyone can register with any party, or none, and change their affiliation at will.
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.
Townhalls are weird.
Town halls? As in the building or does this mean something else? Aren’t town halls quite common and normal elsewhere?
Flags everywhere is weird.
We kinda do this in Denmark too tbh. I personally don’t find it that weird due to that.
Townhalls are a type of political event. They are typically small forum events held in places like town halls or school gyms and involve the politician giving a short speech typically limited to a single issue or current event followed by a longer period where the audience asks the politician questions. It’s not limited to campaigning, legislators often hold these events outside of elections. Theoretically they give the politician the opportunity to hear issues and concerns that their constituents most care about but mostly they are used to drum up support for legislation that the politician already supports.
Hmm okay. I do think we have something similar here where there might be meetings that we call “citizen meetings” where anyone is invited to come and hear about a current political topic. It’s mostly informative and people can ask questions and stuff, not related to campaigning or elections mostly I would say. So yea I don’t think that is too weird honestly.
I think they’re talking about town hall meetings.
I’m not sure about the format but I know that towns in Denmark also occasionally calls for meetings. This doesn’t sound that weird to me
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.
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 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.
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 ;)
In my home country of Finland, you can be elected from prison.
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
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
