• lath@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I’m not from the US either, but I’ve seen enough to attempt answering this.

    They have two voting systems

    • popular vote
    • electoral college vote

    Popular vote is the easily corruptible people going out and voting after a long period of politicians lying their teeth off face to face.

    Electoral college vote is a bunch of easily corruptible fuckwits who vote with whoever pays best, regardless of popular voting.

    Electoral college vote seems to matter more than popular vote. Not sure how or why. So less popular candidates can win because fuck the people, I guess.

    • Jojo, Lady of the West@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 months ago

      Alright, the system is bad and problematic, but it’s not quite that bad and problematic.

      While it’s theoretically possible you could subvert an elector by bribing them or whatever, there are systems in place to prevent that, and they haven’t really needed to be tested. The closest we’ve come to that problem wasn’t electors being bribed, it was Donald Trump bringing people who weren’t duly appointed electors to the capitol to try and let them cast votes instead. So not bribing electors, but replacing them. Still the electoral college has a lot of issues and is pretty much obsolete even for the most charitable interpretation of its purpose

      As for the popular vote being “corruptible” people voting, I don’t know what the qualifier is trying to accomplish. Why “corruptible”? The “did not vote” people are folks who are convinced their vote won’t matter, as well as folks for whom voting has been made deliberately “challenging” (read: effectively impossible). The people who do vote generally feel like they made the right decision, in my experience, win or lose, even if they decide to vote differently in the next one.