So you’re telling me that, not only are federal elections decided by states rather than votes, but each individual state has their own set of laws to prevent you from appearing in the ballot? And it’s somehow still fine because “you can just do a write-in vote”?
My favourite one is the Texan one, where you need to have gotten boatload of votes in order to appear on the ballot.
For a registered political party in a statewide election to gain ballot access, they must either: obtain 5% of the vote in any statewide election; or collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast in the preceding election for governor, and must do so by January 2 of the year in which such statewide election is held. An independent candidate for any statewide office must collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast for governor, and must do so beginning the day after primary elections are held and complete collection within 60 days thereafter (if runoff elections are held, the window is shortened to beginning the day after runoff elections are held and completed within 30 days thereafter). The petition signature cannot be from anyone who voted in either primary (including runoff), and voters cannot sign multiple petitions (they must sign a petition for one party or candidate only).
In Democratic America, you can only win elections if you’ve already won the elections.
I don’t understand what you’re responding to here. Vote by state?
But I also don’t see the need to sacrifice accuracy by sampling votes for the sake of “efficiency”. The voting method of the USA is a laughing stock here in Brazil, where we usually know the results within 12 hours of the polls closing. Their voting methods aren’t inefficient due to some intrinsic property of polling the whole population, they’re just doing their best to prevent non-white/working people from voting.
Either way, this post is just complaining about how the USA states have made it effectively impossible for parties like the PSL to compete in elections by denying them ballot access, then turn around and call that democracy. In no way did I intend to imply that voting is equivalent to democracy, which it is not. Voting is just a mechanism for legitimisation of a regime, whether it is democratic or not.
Clearly I’m not communicating this very well, and I only meant it as an off hand comment not a world changing statement. No, I wasn’t concerned about efficiency, just pointing out that we know how to do voting, but bourgeois democracy chooses not to.