Democracy USA Style

One journalist at the Beeb has been having a go at democracy in the USA which allows a lose of the popular vote to become president. Laughably he uses Britain's parliamentary democracy as a utopian model of 'one person, one vote'!..

And I didn't say that the American people will elect their president, because collectively they do no such thing: for the popular ballot in each state is converted into a delegated franchise in an institution called the Electoral College, and it's the members of the college, whose numbers reflect the combined representation of each state in both houses of Congress, who actually vote for one or other of the candidates.

Because of the uneven distribution of the US population, this means a presidential contender can actually lose the popular vote across the whole nation, but can still win the Electoral College, as George Bush himself did in 2000, and as Benjamin Harrison did in 1888, and as Rutherford B Hayes had done 12 years before that...

...But it's certainly not a democracy in the sense that most of us would understand that term, when it comes to selecting - rather than electing - a president, and it was never intended that it should be

He assumes that democracy has to mean every vote is counted equally. In the UK a vote in a marginal constituency is worth more than one in a safe one. Further, the USA is federal, unlike the UK. The US system is still democratic, it is just that votes are filtered through a particular system and so marginal differences can lead to bizarre results. The same is true of every electoral system in the world, including the UK, where marginal swings can get lost in the first-past-the-post system but broad trends and swings are reflected crudely but fairly effectively.

What's more, us voters in the UK don't even get a chance to directly elect our prime minister, so which system is more democratic?

If our political parties opened up their leader selection process, and held open primaries around the country, it might help re-engage the public in the political process. If I had the opportunity to select the leader of the Conservative party or Labour party, it would certainly start to draw me back in. The system of open primaries is perhaps one of the reasons the US political system is dominated by just two parties and smaller parties find it hard to gain traction.