this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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There was the big election where the sitting president was replaced. I guess that's something.
Except when it doesn't happen:
Bush II did not win the election, he was appointed before the recounts were even tallied.
Trump was appointed to the presidency after losing the election in 2016 to Hillary Clinton by the Electoral College. Hilary won by 3M votes or 2% of the vote.
Literally two presidents during my lifetime failed to win the popular vote and every time this occurred it was to the benefit of a largely unpopular political party who used technicalities built into the Constitution to overturn the democratic will of the people. Funny how it never has worked in the opposite direction, almost as if it was built-in with that idea in mind.
We do not have a democracy, we have a sham system that puts the interests of business before the interests of people.
But your system isn't based on direct popular vote for the president. You vote for state electors and then they vote directly and the candidate who gets the majority of those votes wins. It's not a failure of democracy or elections not happening or being rigged if one with the simple majority loses to one with more state elector votes. It's just your weird system at work.
You've had a few swings of the balance of the parties, replacing a sitting president and now upcoming presidential elections. The elections are mostly free and fair with large enfranchisement. I'd call that a democracy, even when the system has some interesting quirks and isn't working as well as it could be.
As for Bush vs Gore, I remember it being a big and controversial thing at the time but don't really know the specifics.