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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Not sure why the directly part is key. In a FPTP parliamentary system, votes don’t translate directly to seats. And the leader of the party that wins the most seats has a lot of power - Canadian PMs have far fewer constraints than an American president.
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Because voting for a single person directly is inherently different than voting for a local representative. There's a reason that there's basically no equivalent of the US's electoral college (at least in terms of voting in someone who has actual power) anywhere in the world that I'm aware of.
Would it make sense if Canada's MPs were chosen by how many municipalities they won vs. how many votes they get? No, that would be stupid. Can you point to a single other jurisdiction that does things the way the US does (again, excluding ceremonial heads of state)?
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It’s pretty clear people only complain about electoral systems when they don’t yield a result they like. The number of Canadians I’ve seen moan about the U.S. electoral system being undemocratic while ignoring the loss of the party that won the popular vote in the last federal election proves that. The Conservatives’ loss is shrugged off with “their support is too concentrated - they should campaign better in the parts of the country where they’re weak.” Not sure why the same advice shouldn’t apply to Democrats.
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You've never heard anyone complain about first past the post in Canada? Really?
Regardless, the US system is exceptionally ridiculous because of the scale of it. Legislative systems with 4-5 parties can lead to some disenfranchisement, as we've seen in Canada where a party that wins the popular vote by a percent or two doesn't form government. But Canada has about 120K people per MP; while the US has about 7 million people per Electoral College delegation. Surely you can see how having 50 all-or-nothing binary options in a population of almost 350 million is a lot different than 338 seats in a population of 41 million or so.
There's nothing wrong with forcing regional representation. But the House of Representatives already does that. And then the Senate takes that to an absurd degree. To also force it on the Presidential election is downright ridiculous and leads to a lot of the problems the US has in terms of its governance.
And that doesn't even get into the absurdity of the fact that states seem to legally be able to ignore the actual vote. It's conceivable that a state with Republican legislators could choose to send electors for Trump, or not send electors at all, even if Harris wins the state. The only thing stopping them appears to be a fear of blowback, not any sort of legal reality.