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This video is an excellent description of the US Election System, made by a woman from Germany who lives in the US. It would be great if every American could understand the system as well as she does.
What do you think? Should Americans (and non-Americans) watch this video and learn about Elections?
Feil description is not accurate and misses the underling propose of the FEDERAL Constitution.
As is often pointed out we are a union of 50 states not 333 million people.
The main propose of the federal goverment was to protect the States from other states and each-other. This is why it was only given "Few and defined powers" of a forign nature, leaving everything else to the people directly.
It made, and still makes no more sense for indiviual people to be directly represented in the Federal goverment on theses forign policy issues, than it does for us to directly vote on each question of forign policy.
The collective nature of theses questions hedging upon effect upon similarly distant and collective objects that individuals ignorant and distant from the same are not equipped to make judgements on.
This is not merely a question of the art of war being the art of deception but the sheer distance and specialization needed to understand the issue outside of it's retrospective effects.
This combined with the even more vital need to maintain the decentralized system via the jealousy of state legislators for power is why the electoral cottage like the U. S. Senate in the original constitution was intended to be cast by the elected State legislators of the same.
The US system does not seem strange at all to me. Australia pinched a large part of it when we federated so we are a derivative to a substantial degree. In any Federal system there needs to be balancing of power between populous states and less populous states and the electoral college seems a reasonably decent compromise.
I strongly and bitterly refute Feli's assertion that King Charles III is Head of State. He is NOT. He is the bloody Monarch of Australia (and Canada, New Zealand, UK etc etc).
Head of State is a Left wing fascist marxist commie concept and I want to hang people who claim the Monarch is Head of State from lamp posts. In the best case it is extraordinary historical ignorance trying to graft a monarchial system into a theoretical governance model it doesn't belong in.
You can see this when Feli tries to equate UK and Germany political system. She can only do this by falsely asserting - without any justification - the Monarch is head of State. .
@RavVid Feil falsely discribes these united States as well and her description misses the underling propose of the FEDERAL Constitution. A common failure particular after 200 years of power hungry federal politicians usurping to themselfs an effectively limitless number of State powers.
That said the idea that the distinction between a basically powerless "head of state" and head of goverment is of any consequence is laughable. What utility is there in a man without the power to act beyond any other man? I almost might as well talk to feil in Germany for all the good negotiating with her head of state will do me.
@monorprise There is kinda a point in that a Monarch is a neutral umpire. If at any time the Monarch was seen as anything as less than neutral than it will end. So it is existential for the Monarch to be neutral and to follow constitutional conventions.
The only real constitutional role of the Monarch is to handle the transfer of power. We can have elections at any time and if there is corruption to have a new election at any time. A heredity Monarch is more trusty worthy than an elected party affiliated politician.
Tell me if you wouldn't mind what Feli gets wrong. Is it Federal usurping states? Your President I think was once chief of clerks but I have seen a congress person say congress is a governance body - not the governing body. That seems a little ass about.
I would appreciate your view.
@RavVid Any one held as accountable as your King is likely to be neutral as to appeal to both sides or at least not offend them so much as to act against him. As such we cannot say under such circumstances if the monarch is a good man.
That is in fact the key to good goverment accountability.
I do believe the British monarch does indeed retrain vast powers in theory. Powers that had been reduced in time by the superiority of parliament to check and if need-be abolish the monarch.
@RavVid
Feil focuses too much on the electoral cottage with represent really the smallest and least significant part of our 50 election systems.
Some of theses error are by important omission such as:
1: Not mentioning the "founders" desires in referring only to the most pro Government half of them that wrote the Constitution of 1787, and not necessarily the most honest part given they did so in disregard of their mandate to simply amend the Articles of Confederation I should add.
So they did Not represent the desire of the founding fathers by themselfs but rather a last minute agreement among them.
2: Even among that group however the idea for direct election of president was proposed and twice rejected. With the idea the president should be elected by congress like it is in Germany being the settled answer until then end when the electoral cottage was added almost as an afterthought with the 50+ 1 rule the founders thought would rarely be achieved.
This fact is reflected in the poorly thought out and most regularly amended design of the original system.
The origins system for example had the runner up become Vice president thus giving him a motive to assassinate the president.
3: she goes on about how states cast their electors winner take all alleging the loser isn't represented as if that were somehow different than any other election.
Are you represented when your constituency's majority elects the other parties representative?
4: Swing state are simply where the winnable votes are, non-winnable votes are ignored in every election, as politicians target the people actually willing to change their mind. it is the People who make their state a swing state, just as it is a person who decides he is not open to voting for either party.
@RavVid
Outright false:
1: She says the number of electors a state gets is suppose to be roughly proportional to the states population and that was never true!
Nor is this non-prepositional fact related to the electoral cottage at all.
As she mentioned earlier, and thus should know better, the electoral cottage is suppose to mirror Congress. Congress is quite explicitly NOT proportional to population.
The Senate was created to to represent the state's in their self-governing capacity (not needing Washington) equally. A fact the constitution cannot even be amended to change per article 5.
2: 3/5th compromise ignores the fact that the southern states wanted the slaves counted as people, it was the northern states that did not. This is again not related to the electoral cottage but congress.
3: Federal popular vote is not important, nor does it represent the will of the people America is not a democracy. Indeed the majority of Americans didn't even have a vote at all for president until the 10th such election in 1824.
@RavVid
I wanted to point out as your not American When I say the electoral cottage being only as representative as congress.
That matters because the size of the house can be changed at any time. It was congress that fixed to to 435 during the "progressive" era (a previous time leftist really dominated due to monopolizing media around the start of the 20th century)
If they wanted the House to be representative they would increase it's number, this would in turn make the electoral cottage more representative.
@monorprise Thank you for the time you have taken in filling me in. I shall need to think and read more around what you have told me. You mention divergence in thought among your founding fathers and that is natural to happen. If I read the federalist papers will that become apparent or will I be getting a slanted one sided view?
I have strong interest in how the US & UK constitutions developed.
@RavVid
The Federalist papers are called the federalist papers because they were written by the "federalist" who contrary to the name were the pro- centralized (they called it consolidated) power side of the political spectrum at the time.
They were also only written to sell the Constitution to the people of the State of New York, few people outside of New York saw them.
In opposition to the federalist were the "anti-federalist" papers written by the other side. The federalist papers are nonetheless important when taken in context of the anti-federalist papers in telling you what in part they were selling at least to the people of New York.
Particularly given they were written by people like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton the former of which Madison wrote most of the Constitution of 1787.
As ultimately its what the people thought they were ratifying that defines what powers they actually agreed to cede to the Federal Constitution.
Once in power Hamilton would later go back on some things he said in selling the document and ended up getting shot by anther New Yorker and Federalist as a result of his dirty political gaming.
Meanwhile Madison would later join the other side and become president, being most faithful to the document he largely wrote.
The other 12 states also had conventions and debates although there is a bit less to go on in most of their cases.
@monorprise This is exactly what I want to learn more about! I had a suspicion you would say the Federalist papers were just one side. Can you suggest reading to get a balanced perspective of thinking at that time?
To me the development of the US and UK constitutions is a fascinating comparison. As my countries constitution derives from both, they are both are highly pertinent to me.
It is also relevant for me because the Left don't like monarchies and despite being trounced at a referendum on the matter, they will undoubtedly try again. I'm not opposed to removing the constitutional role of the monarch. Our equivalent of Scotus could issue election writs for example on advise to do so by parliament.
I am opposed to grafting a third tier of partisan gov't into a system not designed to have it however.
I am quite happy for the monarch to be reduced to being Head of Bling.
@RavVid
I hate to disappoint you but you must understand there can exist no such single document just as there can exist no such author. Everyone has a bias and limited knowledge. to make a good judgement you have to hear both sides and think for yourself.
The American Constitutional system was created by people who drew heavily upon the existing brittish system, the lesions of the English civil war, as well as the Swiss confederacy and the roman republic/empire.
Unfortunately even knowing of their history this is not to say the people would draw working conclusions. "working" of course is how you define its success in achieving the objectives you value most.
Regretfully not everyone agrees on that objective which of course is part of the broader problem every system has to solve for both stability and accommodation of people's needs over both the short and long term.
@monorprise Not disappointed as differences are to be expected and some objectives might be hidden. These were monumental times. The significance of the English civil war and the subsequent Glorious Revolution is not at all appreciated in Commonwealth countries yet it is as significant as your War of Independence has been for the US. Absolute monarchy was ended after all.
Thanks for chatting.
@RavVid I would say for English speaking people there is indeed a very rich history going back even before the Magna Carta which itself represents the first constitution a contract defining the limits of our consent to be governed.
This is where our system of goverment and Idea of the right of the people ultimately claim their origin. England being a more human sized island enabled this idea, and the fact that it does in some limited degree limit the government's ability to stand up militarily at all times to be more defensible.
By contrast the Romans after all beveled in a much more burial system of might makes right. Their union was designed to serve Rome and subjugate the world to Rome's interest. The concessions they made thereafter were in recognition of military reality, and ultimatum destroyed their Roman republic by weight of the military required to subjugate its neighbors.
That said Australia has a lot more in common with America and Canada than it does with the united Kingdom being a large federal state. It is the sere distances and size of our respective federations which preclude long term cultural and economic homogeneity and thus require federalism that the united kingdom did not as much.
The same size also makes our countries far less "human sized", meaning even with a limited goverment the vast resources of the state operating domestically are beyond what we as individuals can see and manage.
This is the problem we both must solve.
@monorprise We got the Federal side of our constitution from the US and even pinched the names of house of reps and senate. It was completely impossible to just have one gov't and the states were well established before federation so necessarily had to be incorporated into the whole. it is too big to be human sized as you well put it. Western Australia is too enormous to be human sized alone 3.6 x Texas
There are indeed financial challenges around operating a federation. Not so much political in our case. There are pressures to level up standards for health care for example. At the same time we have mendicant states who reject development and get money put in their begging bowl for suppressing economic development. It is certainly beyond individuals to even track. It s highly questionable they have a right to perform poorly.
In trying to solve a problem we have made it worse.
I sometimes get a head spin wrt the UK that their national parliament gets down to a local level at times because there are only LGA councils otherwise.
It is possible that with devolution that the UK is on the way to a federal system e. g. Scottish Parliament. Devolution is not a federal system but could be a stepping stone perhaps.
The UK is possibly moving to a federal light system with a Scottish parliament. It will be interesting if it goes further
@RavVid Probably not a good idea to trust people skilled only in periodically winning a popularity contest to solve problems. Their utility in that capacity is more to get rid of the people who are otherwise born into it and doing a bad job during the times when the voting public is serous about results rather than feelings.
Regarding the senate I am not sure how accurate the Wikipedia page is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate
Althou it sounds better than the Canadian or British senates which are basically just elite institutions without any other propose than to 'protect' their interest not unlike the Roman Senate.
The Australian senate does look like a less significant version of the U. S. Senate. I don't think the people who create the Australian senate quite understood the propose of the senate, and instead took the contemporaneity progressive idea which was a redundant version of the house.
I don't think it matters thou for Australia which is as homogeneous culturally as Canada, and smaller. It may matter a lot more in the years to come as Australia becomes more diverse and its regional issues become more consequential.
For the record The U. S. Senate is in fact the most powerful house of the Federal legislator, with sole power over the appointment of executive officers and treaties. In addition to effectively equal legislative power. (in practice the spending limitation doesn't mean anything).
Neither house has executive power thou.
@monorprise The Wikipedia page is pretty accurate though it gives the impression that a senator cannot be a minister which is not so. They can be and therefore be part of the executive gov't.
I do like that the executive is within parliament because they can be held to account readily and Question Time is an institutional means of doing so. It is bash up the gov't hour if the opposition can.
Our constitution is a mish mash of both the US and Westminster, so yes, it is not exactly the same as either. .
The UK House of Lords is clearly an anachronism of earlier time but there are conventions around the House of Lords blocking the will of the House of Commons. Why Canada went for an appointed Senate I can't say but i find that offensive. Any such concept was ridiculed out of possibility in Australia in the 1800's.
Our senate is technically a states house but it never has functioned as such; the party system is sadly too strong. It also functions very differently not because of constitutional reasons but because of the voting system used. Proportional representation within a state.
That means that minor parties can have senators. The upside is minor party political views are represented in parliament and the downside is exactly the same. Minor parties can hold gov'ts to ransom by voting legislation down in the Senate but usually extract concessions from gov't for the minors agenda.
i guess that functions like the filibuster in the US and leads to compromise. Senators have no time limit of how long they can speak but no one has ever read Dr Zeus into the record.
With treaties there can often be enabling legislation and it s like any legislation requiring to pass both houses. Treaties at least need to be approved by both houses. Our Senate might not have sole say but at a minimum it must approve.
Appointments are most alien to me in the US system. Ministers must be members of parliament or become members within 3 months of appointment so that is quite different. The public service is expected to be neutral doing the Minister's bidding who is always the fall guy. It just doesn't work for a minister to say that wasn't my fault they went off and did that behind my back.
The tough part to me is judges. As a separate branch of gov't i don't like it being politicized but of course they have political/philosophical views and have found implied rights. The US way is at least open and honest whilst our is quite hidden.
As an example an alien pedophile was convicted and served his time and was put in the detention waiting deportation. But he just wouldn't cooperate in the deportation. Our High Court found he couldn't be held till he signed the forms and forced his release. Of course he immediately re-offended on release. It doesn't pass the pub test.
in the US system those judges might have been a little more sensible I think.
We could do with a constitutional change requiring judges to decide on black letter law and to leave legislating to the legislature.
I do like the openness of the US way and see it as a strength we lack.
Thanks for raising this, as it helps my understanding which is always a good thing.
A better system would be just to let woman vote. Because if you can meet a woman's standards then you exceed a man's.
Sexist
@purplepoppy
given how regularly women select deadbeats, jerks, and players that only pump and dump them or sleep around with 3-5 other women.
If only women voted assuming those who managed to avoid summery execution by a brutal boyfriend "goverment" and didn't also starve to death for lack of freedom under him or his predecessor, we would work our entire lives in service of everyone but ourselfs.
Women have terrible judgement and standards, the proof is in the results soo many of them regulatory get. But what do you expect of a sex who's mind has for thousands of years been limited to domestic submitting to a man.
Women simply didn't evolve good judgement because they were rarely if ever in a position to have any such judgement beyond submission to a more powerful man in the first place.
@AviatorTom A system where state votes, not the country's population 😆
@Kelly6 That is correct, and why the Founding Fathers created this compromise. They discussed two options to elect the President: 1 - Popular vote, they don't trust people to have that kind of knowledge and power, plus the Constitution keeps most powers with the states, not the overall country; 2 - each state gets one vote, gives too much power to small states. The Electoral College is a reasonable, though imperfect, compromise between those two options, power remains with the states, with larger states having more power than small states.
@AviatorTom
Question is that why do Americans push other countries to make a democratic system where public should vote.
@AviatorTom @Kelly6
It is worth remembering the Constitutional convention of 1787 consisted only of the more pro goverment half of the political spectrum (the anti-federalist boycotted the convention). A convention i should remind you was called simply to add taxing powers to the existing articles of confederation.
Even then while proposed the idea of a direct election of president was twice rejected. Instead the convention initially went with congressional election, similar to how parliamentary systems do it still, and the prior Articles of Confederation did it.
The electoral cottage was added at the end and was not expected that 2 parties would form to insure it would be the normal method.
For absurdly obvious reasons feil like many other opponents of the electorate cottage are also wrong about the system being giving unfair power to some states.
That has nothing to do with the electoral cottage which simply mirrors the existing congress.
Remember the electoral cottage is a simple single use legislator.
Opinion
7Opinion
This is, what they don't teach in the public schools today. Most young people do not understand how the government functions, how the system of checks and balances were divided and our God given rights under the Constitution. I just read a book rhat had a lot of information about the Constitution that I did not know.
@exitseven
No they teach even bigger and more simplistic half truths in school that what Feil says.
Indeed most electors were not even chosen by popular vote until 1824. This did not become universal until 1868.
I haven't watched yet the whole "electoral college thing" always makes me smile how even I googled once and still find it a mystery how "the electoral college is not a physical location, it's a system" lol 😆😆😆😆😆
Only the ''outsider'' part of your question touches me here -
I'm thinksing...: who cares? (outside)
I got my own issues to deal with. All I might need to know is, who is on the helm over there. I saw them come. I saw them go. It changed nothing of relevance in my own life.
u if the popular vote won... the video would be 30 seconds, plus a two minute ad
@NathanDavis
If the popular vote won we would be in never ending conflict about how other state's game their election system to inflate votes, or worse still in a perpetual state of Civil war over the disenfranchisement imposed upon us by the 'voting' system Washington chooses.
The decentralized design of the election system lets each state decide how elections are conducted and individuals to vote among them with their feet.
Which is why people are voting to leave californium because its election system is basically tottaly ridged.
@monorprise but the video would, still... be that short
" This Clown won... and, oh yeah... we're still fucking primates about it"
@NathanDavis
I don't think Feil understand that nearly everything we vote for even today is state or local.
The federal goverment was created to protect the states from other states forign and domestic, so that we could vote with our ballots and our feet. Not rob us of both rights by governing them instead.
People only think otherwise because in the last 200 years particularly the last 100 our federal goverment has gone from mostly Constitutional goverment of "few and defined powers" to an almost entirely unconstitutional goverment of few and vague limits.
In this capacity the presidency and congress has uerped the domestic characteristic of state governments, in a highly dysfunctional and laughably unmanagablky corrupt way.
We got people in Montana who are bankrupted because an unaccountable federal bureaucrat wants to bully them into submission, using an occasional puddle of water nobody else has ever seen as an excuse.
We got even more stories like that from every other equally unaccountably anonymous and all powerfully federal employees of nearly every other agency.
Where is our democracy now? "Federal elections" and power grabs have utterly destroyed it. Im sorry to say size matters in democracy, sizer keeps people from both seeing and caring what the goverment does.
@monorprise yeah, let's not act like every big company funding each side of every election is not a rigged system...
shall we?
@NathanDavis
The problem isn't what people with money buy, its what politicians with to much power to be accountable have of that power available to sell for money rather than votes.
Those politicians who make & selectively enforce their own rules would abuse and sell this power they don't need to be elected either way under the same.
So your really barking up a idiot tree pretending people with money are the problem that can somehow be solved by politicians with too much power.
In reality the same in office politicians just want more power over the resources and campaigns of their rivals to better secure their own hold on power.
@monorprise literally...
one of them is running for president... instead of being held accountable, lmao...
and yes, that's all because of people with money and the power, allow it
don't pretend that people with money and power are a different species from politicians
@NathanDavis
You clearly haven't seen the amount of money most every other long serving politician has made while in office.
Trump as the distinction of earning his fortunate before and almost unheard of since the the first presidents 200 years ago of actually losing money while in office. Clearly Trump didn't take the financial "opperunties" every other president has mysteriously ended up with.
Being for president has been financially a disaster for him and his family.
@monorprise has made, is not the same as declared
I'm sure you understand that... right?
Americans should see the gay bull shit we do in Spain for elections. It's cancerous.
No. she's as full of shit and ignorance as the Americans she's talking about, it seems.
MY description of the U. S. Election System is FUBARed !!!(As will be America should Agent Orange be re-elected!!!)
Are Americans allowed to reply?
Felicia is a sweetheart
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