U.S. 2016: For whom will you vote?

[Aractus]

*facepalm*

Sure Aractus. Having democratic elections for party leaders is the "whole problem" with the US system. That kind of comment totally betrays your absolute ignorance of US elections, IMO.

It's the whole problem with the Presidential appointment, I should have clarified that. There are many more problems with the US system itself, not the least of which being that it isn't actually democratic at all in practise:

"When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." - Gilens & Page, 2014



I'm not suggesting the Westminster system is perfect, just that the US system is horrendously bad. Why do our politicians keep saying "we don't want to end up like the US"? It's obvious to our politicians, and everyone, that the US system is not democratic. It favours the elites. The seminal paper by Gilens & Page linked to above clearly shows that is the case with empirical evidence. Tiberius, if you want to deny reality and live in a delusion where America has it all right, then that's fine. That's your choice. All I am suggesting is that America should learn from Australia and European countries to improve their "democracy".

I think the US is unbelievably stubborn in thinking they need to come up with their own system without considering how other places do it. Don't forget you use the secret ballot that we invented - it's perfectly fine to use the innovations of other nation states. The US needs to realise where they have got things horribly wrong and reform them - like electronic voting for example. There's a reason we don't use large-scale electronic voting - we sent people to the US to investigate the system, they came back and informed the government "absolutely not". Read the report from the joint standing committee:

"After hearing from a range of experts, and surveying the international electoral landscapes it is clear to me that Australia is not in a position to introduce any large-scale system of electronic voting in the near future without catastrophically compromising our electoral integrity."

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Read what happened in the Netherlands. They had moved completely to electronic voting with overwhelming public support. It had been used in many elections. A group of computer scientists proved that the results could be tampered with, without detection. Following this, the Dutch government passed a law banning the use of electronic voting in the future.

There's a reason why we write on paper ballots with a pencil. A very good reason. You can use pen if you wish, that's still a valid formal vote, although there's a very good reason why pencils are provided: they can't be tampered with. Pens can have disappearing ink, meaning if pens were provided all someone has to do is go to a polling place and replace the ink in order to tamper with an election. Pencil graphite can't be replaced with a disappearing ink.

Anyway, yes you are correct there are many, many, many problems with the US system, and what I meant in my previous post is that the President should be appointed by the party room, not by voters. When voters have a choice they vote in retards that are unsuitable to be the leaders like Trump and Clinton, or in the UK Maggie May.