Quote Originally Posted by Orgoner View Post
Must admit I've been biting my tongue on this one, at least in terms of floating my thoughts and opinions out there as someone who's experienced (and voted in) elections on both sides of the Pond.

I guess the one observation I would make is that I really don't care for the way in which the presidential election is run. It isn't particularly democratic because, as it turns out, individual votes don't carry equal value.

It probably hasn't been overly emphasized in the UK, but the final result is determined by votes from an electoral college, which is essentially a combination of each individual state treated as a "first past the post" unit, with the number of votes they assign loosely based on the population of that state.

To "win" the electoral college, a candidate has to garner 270 votes.

Forty-odd of the states lean fairly solidly in one direction or the other (Red=Republican ("sort of" Conservative), Blue=Democrat ("sort of" Labour)), so their electoral votes are all but nailed-on as assigned to one candidate or the other as they are extremely unlikely to flip the other way..

Of the remaining states, they are either small fry (e.g. New Hampshire, which, though fairly purple. only has four electoral college votes) or larger "swing" states (the seven you've probably been hearing about in the news) where the presidential race is really taking place because of the number of electoral college votes they carry.

An individual vote in a swing state is therefore likely to be much more important than any vote in any of the other states.

Seems wrong to me: not that the majority can always be relied upon to vote sensibly, but it seems to me that the president should be the candidate receiving the most individual votes from individual people, not effectively chosen by a handful of larger purple states that may not look like much of the rest of the country.

All that said, it could absolutely be argued that a state like New Hampshire has an outsized influence on the Senate, for which each of the fifty states elect two candidates.

The House of Representatives is, as its name suggests, much more representative as it is made up of officials elected from similarly sized distructs (although there seems to be an awful lot of gerrymandering of these for political purposes).

I'll shut up as this stuff tends to get me annoyed and I can feel my hackles rising...
Hi Orgs,

You would be surprised at the amount of attention, and detail, that the US election attracts (or not, maybe). It's not like the 5 mobile messages a day and numerous follow-up texts to voters in the swing states like Pennsylvania featured on our BBC news today, or the claim by the Harris campaign to have "knocked on the door" of 3 million voters over the weekend!, but it is VERY in-depth considering. I agree with you regarding the popular vote vs electoral college. Folks might not like the outcome but at least they would know who really won (unless of course it was Trump in present circumstances, in which case who would know?)

Proportional representation is often suggested as a way of addressing the issues you mention regarding the Senate and House of Representatives (kind of equivalent to our House of Commons and House of Lords except the Lords aren't voted for, they are appointed (or if hereditary peers, the seat is passed won the generations). Thing is, proportional representation tends to deliver coalition government, not always (or ever?) a good thing (Israel is an example of said system, where religious minority parties are very powerful))