Re: July the 4th

In article <c6beb$468fae98$cef8887a$9169@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, JF Mezei
<jfmezei.spamnot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Yes, there are a few educated individuals here and there who realised
what was going on and were dead set against that administration. But the
USA electoral system concluded that the majority of americans supported
that administration and that is what the rest of the world sees.

The majority of voters DID elect Bush the second time. The majority of
voters did NOT elect Bush the first time, but he had a majority in the
electoral system. One reason for the lack of credibility of the USA in
the world is that they claim to be a democratic society, but the person
who got the most popular votes (Al Gore, despite a) Nader getting an
appreciable chunk of his votes (see below) and b) all the problems in
Florida) did not get elected. If, say, Milosovic had implemented such
an electoral system in Yugoslavia, the rest of the world would have
(rightly) said "Whom are you trying to fool?".

Electoral systems can be very unfair/weird. In Canada, the now
opposition party chose a new leader. Neither of the 2 top candidates won
the leadership, it was the 3rd one who did. As a result, the Liberals
are now stuck with a boring, unelectable candidate who barely speaks
english. So instead of immediatly topling the current minority
government to force an election , the Liberals are letting the right
wing Reform party continue to govern canada because they know they would
lose an election if held with the current leader.

The French system for presidential elections makes more sense: 2 rounds
of voting. Only 2 survive the first round. This ensures that the leader
is one of the 2 most popular persons.

This shows the difference in perspective. You consider the French
system better, I consider it worse. :-|

The problem with the French system is the following. Assume there are
five candidates, say three left-of-centre candidates and two
right-of-centre candidate. Assume that the votes are 15/20/20/22/23.
That is, 55% want a left-of-centre candidate. However, the runoff will
be between the two right-of-centre candidates.

The proper way to do this is not to have the runoff between the two top
candidates in the first round, but rather to remove the candidate who
did worst and have the runoff between the remaining candidates,
iterating until there are just two left.

This does not imply that many elections. Actually, one needs just one.
Voters then rank candidates in order of preference. In the first round,
everyone voted for their first-ranked candidate. In the second round,
those whose first-ranked candidate is no longer there voted for their
second-ranked candidate etc.

In the USA, the whole "primaries" process is still stuck in the horse
carriage days except that now,

Indeed. This might have made some sort of sense back when the country
was founded, but makes no sense today where communication is faster.
(And this doesn't need voting machines etc---modern electoral systems
can and do work with paper ballots.)

voters in some states get to know the
results of the election held in others states and hence this skews the
votes.

Indeed.

And in both the last democratic race and the liberal race in Canada, the
winner wasn't chosen on electability, he was chosen based on his
political ingenuity to win the votes AT THE CONVENTION.

Well, if the party elects the candidate, it's up to them how to do it.
A party which can't come up with a good candidate is probably not good
at other things either.

And then there is the whole issueu of gerrymandering, which in some form
or another almost always is an issue when there is the
one-representative-per-district approach.

The proper way to do things is proportional representation. (By the
way, this does not necessarily imply that there are no representatives
who feel that they represent a particular area of the country. One can
have a system (such as in Germany) where each district elects a
representative (based on simple majority, which is not a problem here),
but at the same time casts a vote for proportional representation. The
number of seats in parliament is determined SOLELY by this second vote,
with each party deducting the number of seats held by directly elected
representatives. The best of both worlds, and works fine with paper
ballots.

The two-party system, such as in the US, France (though at least they
have runoffs, though this does not always make sense as noted above) and
the UK is a farce. One can have, say, 20--30 per cent of the population
who regularly vote but whose party has NO seats in the parliament. From
the point of view of proportional representation, a two-party system is
only slightly better than a one-party system. Remember that former East
Germany called itself the German Democratic Republic. Did that make it
democratic? No. Nor does any other country calling itself democratic
make itself democratic unless deeds (seats in parliament at least
roughly correspond to the votes cast) follow words.

.

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