Australia has a pretty good preferential voting system too.

The only major problem with elections in Australia that comes to my mind is the way political advertising works. Truth in advertising laws do not apply to political ads, for fuck-knows what reason. And there's a lot of money sloshing around for the purpose of supporting the politicians who support certain groups. The media landscape isn't exactly an even playing field.

But the voting part itself is genuinely quite well done.

We can't expect Americans to travel to Australia. Be realistic.

We give a lot of chances to vote in the US. Mail in ballots, early voting, polling places open late. Discounting the tiny group of people who do not have and cannot get proper ID, and the tiny group of totally disabled people with no support system whatsoever, everyone should be able to figure out getting their vote in.

That leaves the people who don’t want to vote. But there is no way around the fact that being unforgivably stupid. Does your vote really matter in our crushingly ineffectual two-party system? Not as much as I would like. But there is an obvious choice between a party intent on dismantling the very foundation of the nation, and one simply content to let it fall apart. Voting for the former assures destruction, voting for the latter gives us time. Voting for neither, is moronic.

My point - Do we think that forcing this group of lazy and/or idiotic Americans to vote would add anything valuable to the political process?

Education is where positive political participation begins. Until we fix that and stop actively making it worse, there is no election reform solution to the festering rot of ignorance and apathy.

When 43/50 states are already locked in and decided a lot of people don't bother. That's a huge reason for people not voting.

If elections were actually decided by popular vote you'd see more people voting. The electoral college is a voter suppression tool.

Misogyny is part of it.

Harris isn't claiming a mandate.

Historically when people vote in higher numbers we end up with Democratic Presidents.

BoTh SiDeS!!

They are not the same. One is an open Nazi party

If only things were that simple. Humans love to focus on just one reason, but when dealing with a population of voters you have to use statistics to understand anything about whats going on. I'm sure sexism was a factor but theres so much more than that.

Correlation is not causation. We elected Obama who was one of the youngest presidents in US history first term. Also he was Black. I'm not saying the country is sexist, but I am saying both the female candidates that made it the general election, ran on dog shit platforms of "more of the same"

While your logic does have a point, and there's no shortage of sexists out there, I must also state that both Clinton and Harris were horrid candidates as well, and both followed a democrat president the people were starting to/were done with.

Not only that, but both times Trump preyed on what the people were desperate to hear: "Better living conditions, lower prices" and all that. This was mainly the illusion of choice between two evils, and they chose the one that seemed to be the lesser one. The one who appeared to be "more honest" and despite being a nepo-baby called out and criticized all other rich people.

The issue is the system itself, and the fact that voters choose their candidates like celebrities or their sports team. See Harris making her campaign way more about celebrity endorsement than commiting to actual societal issues. She was never gonna win like that, and even if she did, she would still be a bad president. Not worse for sure, now that we all are seeing current Trump starting all sorts of conflicts and trying to become a dictator, but still a bad president.

The US can elect a female president. But so far the options picked for that were absolutely horrid, and I know there's several good and competent female leaders who are both democrats and republicans. Sadly they have too much common sense or lean too much to the centre to be taken seriously by the ones who want to create a spectacle.

Basically if Tim Walz was the presidential candidate he probably would have won.

Many of us got voter roll purged. If you get purged you don't technically get a vote because provisional ballots are only counted if the race is close ... and the race wasn't close because of the provisional ballots.

Winning by less than 1% is not decisive.

Did you somehow miss that the meme is about the people who chose to vote for a third party, or not at all?

I mean no

In an election between Bush and Kerry (the guy who lost 2004 election) or something like that then yes. People can be annoyed or just too busy to vote.

This election was perfectly clear that the future of US democracy was at stake and more than 1/3 of the voters decided to not show up. They decided that they were fine not choosing and as such fine with either option. I mean even if the choice was between Trump and a dog, the dog should have won by a landslide. 4 years of nothing would have been miles better than the decades that US is going back.

This presidency is already catastrophic and it barely even started.

I don’t even know how the US and the world can handle 4 years of this shit at this pace.

While I'm sure that was part of it, a lot of people didn't vote for other reasons as well. Someone I know who you would probably consider "left" didn't vote at all because of Harris supporting Israel (I'm aware trump is worse for Palestinians), and I know a bunch of other people I've spoken to online also didn't vote at all for the same reason.

Plus I suspect a lot of other previous Biden voters didn't vote at all for similar reasons, like possibly all party's are owned by the rich.

Bottom line, a class war is needed to get the rich in check.

You lot never blame the dem leadership for making their biggest funder AIPAC/Israel, and allowing AIPAC funding to completely steer the party platform, the candidate choice, and the course of the race. Somehow Dem leaders are simply immune from blame in your eyes, even when AIPAC steers this outcome straight to a loss and Israelis said they never wanted the dems to win anyway.
The dems losing was much more desirable to AIPAC than a non genocide dem entering the race. The polls told dem leadership they were going to lose for the entire race and they decided to take the loss rather than give in to the no-to-genocide voters. AIPAC/Israel was more important to dem leadership than winning the race. Why do you still imagine that AIPAC supports dem voters or cares about America? You've learned nothing and you're on the way to lose some more. Did you hear Dem leaders talk about the needs of the voters very much? No. You didnt-- but you sure saw them get animated and passionate about supporting zionist war crimes.

For my vote, I wasnt going to lift a finger for any war criminal of any party, even if it meant this country burned itself to the ground. If the choice is murder lots of innocents or burn this place to the ground, I chose not to participate and let this place burn itself to the ground, and I'll do it again if needed-- so will lots of other people -- and theres nothing you can do about it. Dems cant win an election without them either.

So "blame" me on the internet all day, your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer. I hope every dem leader gets to experience unemployment, and if it leads to revolution or "regime change" as we like to casually say it when its other countries suffering, then so be it. Its past time for this farce to "fundamentally change".

The only significantly statically impactful group of "non voters" is the population that was unable to or inconvenienced heavily by voting.

Meaning the major majority of voters that didn't vote were either unable to because of other obligations (work, childcare, etc) with a small subset of that being people that were no motivated enough to deal with the inconvenience of visiting a poll line (4hours in line) after a 10 hour shift.

These are the vast vast majority of people that did not show up. Beyond that an even smaller percentage was the "protest voters' that even if 100% of which went to Harris she still would have lost.

I guess I just want to say "in conclusion" that the vast majority of voters that didn't vote were giving you your Starbucks or your Taco Bell.

I think we should spend less time blaming voters and more time being critical of the politicians and party that gives zero reason for the working class to "risk" their shift for.

No one's gonna "risk a shift" for the policies and messaging that Harris communicated. You don't get people to "risk their shift" for voting for a lesser evil.