Cred Forums I'm super confused about the american election. Please help me out
There has been a fuss everywhere on whether people want Hillary or Trump, but then I hear that the president is actually elected by a bunch of representators who are politicians?
Those representators also most likely are bought to vote for either side, so what are the american people actually voting for? The representatives? Or are they voting for their president of choice and the representators HAVE to vote for whatever is the outcome of that?
In Switzerland, the Bundesrat is elected by representatives, that have been elected by the people. If it works the same way in the US then I don't understand why there are huge campaigns for the people.
Bentley Green
Democracy isn't real man.
Christopher Baker
>Ta1 be my AI girlfriend
Camden Wood
In USA you vote so the electoral college will vote for your candidate.
Carter Watson
So if theoretically, every person in a certain states votes Trump, the representatives of that state HAVE to vote Trump too?
What happens if it is 50:50? can the representatives choose for themselves?
Daniel Adams
But you do realize Americans don't even really vote but click a button? What the machine does is completely up to the people who have access to it or who created the system.
Hudson Reyes
Hm, no I didn't know that. I thought it is done via paper. But even then, those who count the voting cards can still do whatever they want
Landon Martinez
Yes, in most cases.
If it's 50/50, then the congress will vote.
Matthew Bell
All but two states electoral college votes are all or nothing requiring a simple majority to gain all of the States votes. Though the electors can vote for someone they did not say they would vote for I can't think of an election where that mattered. If the electoral college went against how the rules of the election are understood to work by the American public the Federal government would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
Lucas Campbell
It depends state to state. Some states have laws where the members of the electoral college have to vote the same way the majority of the state votes. Others have no such laws and may vote however they please, but it's fairly uncommon for them to go against the majority. Doing so pretty much guarantees they won't be in the electoral college for the next election.
For example during the 2000 elections, one person of the electoral college of some random state cast his vote for Gore's vice presidential candidate (and even misspelled his name), thus taking one vote away from Gore.
>What happens if it is 50:50? can the representatives choose for themselves?
I believe so, yes.
Anthony Walker
That's not how voter fraud is performed, suffice it to say that it involves buses of illegal minorities and fake identifications.
Chase Harris
Thx to everyone who replied, it's a lot more clear now!
Jordan Green
>What happens if it is 50:50?
50%+ 1 single vote means you win all the electoral votes. In order to be perfect 50/50 split you would need to randomly get an even number of voters, which I don't think has ever happened.
Chase Davis
No need to convince me about such details, when I think "America" it's not "like Europe but with freefdom" but the same set of thoughts I would have for other black continents, like South America or Africa. As far as I see it elections are just a huge entertainment block for Americans where they can binge drink and yell for their team, much like in sports. Nobody really cares for the results.
Aiden Price
stop posting AI shit in every thread faggot, we're not even close to GET yet.
Michael Nguyen
The reason we have the electoral college system for presidential elections instead of popular vote are so that smaller states have more influence.
In the original 13 colonies, Virginia was the largest state by far and had a larger population than the 2'nd and 3'rd largest state combined, and a larger population than the 6 smallest states combined.
The smaller states realized they would basically get dominated by Virginia, so they demanded disproportionately high representation, which is why we have electoral college.
You can look up maps that show the electoral college votes per capita by state, and it is like twice as high for small states than it is for California.
Ayden Gomez
Fuck off queer
Jayden Richardson
Does the President in the US have any real power or is it just a ceremonial head of state and military role, who can go crazy and use executive orders (which are then ignored), like in Austria?
Grayson Ross
I think the president has a veto that he can use but other than that he's probably mostly a mascot that people look up to. The cabinet makes all the decisions.
John Adams
I live in BFE but at least in my state, one of the poorest we do have paper ballots, but it's made so a machine can read them because they wanted to remove human error.
Only time I've ever heard of them doing a human count is when there was an outcry in Florida about a miscount
Jason Robinson
Little of column A, little of column B. The president is certainly more than just a figurehead, but he doesn't have absolute power either.
For example back when Obama was first trying to get elected he was talking about how he would usher in free healthcare for all citizens. However that shit didn't fly in Congress and we got the aborted carcass that is now known as "Obamacare". Likewise if Bernie had been in the race and won in November he wouldn't have been able to do half the shit he wanted/said he was going to do. Same thing applies to Trump if he gets in.