Towards the presidential run of 2024
- Thread starter sene5hos
- Start date
American flavor of democracy is unique - most governments formed after WW2 generally follow the parliamentary model.
He also said that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the country, called them "animals", identified his enemies as "vermin" and also promised a "bloodbath" if he wasn't elected in November.
It's arcane. It's archaic. It's racist. It's fucked up.
It was set up this way by the Founders as a concession to slave states (along with counting slaves as 3/5 of a human) to give low population slave states more political power.
We have representative/indirect government here too. Some areas have 2x fewer voters per representatives.
What is racist of every state getting a certain number of representatives, somewhat balanced by population?
Democracy (majority rules) must often be limited by rules to protect the individual or minorities.
Note also that illegal immigrants are counted in apportionment of districts and electoral college votes. Surprising to many!
Because it gave 'slave states' outsized power to select the president. These 'slaves states' were also allowed to count their slaves as 3/5 of a person in determining the number of members of the House of Representatives and consequently the number of electoral college votes for that state. If you are given more political power because you have slaves, and want slavery to continue, that's a racists system.
Yes. Slavery was racist.
The electoral college existed during slavery but so did the postal system.
Slavery was the problem not the electoral college or the postal system. There is no remnants of racism in either.
Strange ! I just on TV that since the false affirmations by Vince and Trump on Haitans in Springfield Ohio, young kids are insulted in school beeing called monkeys.
What those two idiots told is completely false. They said that there was 30 000 Jaitans immigrants in Springfield for a white population of 60 000.
The thruth (a word unknown by Trump and Vance) is 10 000 to 12 000 Haitan immigrants in th entire Clark county !
So before claiming that there is no racism, tell that to the President and Vice-President candidates for the Republican party !
Well that is one unusual comparison. The fact remains that the EC, born out of a concession to slave states, is an undemocratic way to elect a president [presidential elections should not be decided by voters in 7 swing states - all votes should count equally], and the EC gives outsized political power to low population states.
Is this not the case in most representative democracies? Scheer got more votes than Trudeau nationwide but lost because his votes were all concentrated while Trudeau had a little everywhere so won more seats?
Us states have electoral votes that are roughly aligned with population. Florida is a big state and was for a long time a swing state. Pennsylvania is not a small state.
If you want to attack something that favors small states attack the senate. Each state big or small gets two.
In the end you have a divided country. Fewer things should be decided by a few marginal voters. The US should reread the 10th amendment and push more decisions to the states.
To the best of my knowledge, no other country on the planet elects it's president/prime minister like the US. In fact in the US, no other election is decided by a slate of electors. The answer to not to push more decisions to the states (and I don't even know how that's applicable here), but to elect the president by popular vote.
Well the UK system (that we use here) has similarities. We don’t elect our pm by popular vote but each district selects representatives that then select the leader. Our system even tolerates that a representative goes against what he or she campaigned as and we also have regions where the ratio of voters/representatives is drastically lower than in others. Finally we also have swing ridings and ridings parties take for granted.
The US is a federation or states and to change the electoral system would be difficult.
Both parties have hypocritical tendencies…
That's a false equivalency. Democrats are not claiming the election is rigged before it is even held. Democrats have not claimed the election was stolen from them with zero evidence to support that claim. Democrats have not put forward false slates of electors in states they lost, Democrats have not tried to get state elevtion officials to find them votes. Democrats have not asked the DOJ to say there was election fraud when DOJ found there wasn't. Democrats have not tried to persuade the VP to refuse to accept and count certified EC votes. Democrats have not sent a mob of supporters to the Capitol to "fight like hell" and to hang the VP to stop the certification. Democrats did not sit in the White House for 3 hours doing nothing while the Capitol was under attack. Democrats have never refused to concede an election they lost. Your equivalency is totally false.
Am not making an equivalency beyond:
some democrats were asking to swear before the election that you would approve the results (independent of what happens) and now some of those democrats (Jamie Raskin, of the Jan 6th commission) are wishy washy on voting to certify Trump if he wins.
I disagree with claims of mass voter fraud in 2020 and definitely denounce the Jan 6th protests. I still think Jamie Raskin here is showing he is a political animal with limited credibility. You can’t apply different standards based solely on politics!
I agree with Flabert's British sensibilities in his posts above. As I have said before, partisanship stunts and slows the creative process in problem solving. Advancement is based on adhering to a predetermined agenda and towing the "party line." One of those party lines is the one on voter fraud. While there is a problem with gerrymandering (which, BTW, is another of the damaging vestiges of partisanship) I agree with Flabert that massive voter fraud is unlikely. What happened to Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln, and Democrats like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, who were their own men and did things many within their parties didn't necessarily agree with. They had the intellect, resolve, industry, and testicular strength to not only brook, but overcome intra-party opposition. We need leaders who are their own men and their own woman as the case may be. Not obsequious sheep and boot lickers looking to curry favor from the party itself.
Trump tried and failed to overturn the 2020 election. If in 2024 he tries and succeeds in stealing the election, no American, including representative Raskin, should accept the results.
Why should the US be like any other country? Has any other country in the world achieved as much success and opportunity for its citizens in the aggregate than the US since its inception? I'll vacation all over the world - but there is no better home country than the US for those who want to succeed and those who actually do succeed in life.
If you want to be like sheep, and follow what other countries around the world do, have at it. And leave the US alone. Our peculiarities are our own. And, empirical fact - we've done pretty damn well with those peculiarities for a good long while.
There is no logical correlation between the success of and the opportunity in the U.S. and the electoral college system in electing a POTUS. No one is being a sheep for pointing out that it is an undemocratic way to elect a president that unfairly advantages one particular political movement to the detriment of an egalitarian society.
I agree with this statement. I am an American and a descendant from a family of European immigrants who did very well after coming to the U.S. compared to what they had when they came here. I do believe the U.S. is the land of opportunity and there is no need to emulate other countries or political systems. I think all countries have positive and negatives but I think the U.S. is probably a tremendous net positive as compared to most other countries, and Canada can probably say the same thing.
That being said we can look at and compare some of the positives and negatives as between Canada, the U.S., and the UK. I actually believe all of these nations should look at what is working and what isn't working and find ways to better their systems.
It's my belief that the electoral college and 2 party system need to overhauled and revised.
Similar threads
