It should be noted that the very principle of presidential elections in the USA is quite different from the traditional view of the electoral process. Unlike most countries, where every citizen directly elects the president, as well as a number of lower-level officials, an indirect system operates in which the final decision about who will govern the country, take delegated by each state electors appointed by the party whose candidate received the majority of the votes of a state. According to the same system, for example, Finland and Estonia citizens choose the presidents, although most political experts and analysts recognize the two-tier electoral system echo of the past.
Traditionally, in the conventional sense of the election campaign in the United States, two candidates are fighting – Republican and Democrat. However, this is not quite true. Among the participants, there are always representatives of small parties (“Green”, Libertarian, Constitutional and other) and independent candidates.
But as practice shows, the representatives of small parties rarely make a serious competition to the representatives of the strongest American “political machines”. You can verify this by examining the map of the distribution of votes among party candidates over the past 50 years.
How many do the Voices of Americans “Weigh”?
Each voter should have the same incentive to express his political will, but this is far from the case in the USA. And this is another completely non-democratic American side: the voices of the inhabitants of the United States “weigh” in different ways. What does it mean?
The fact is that the number of electors is distributed among the states unevenly and depends on how many constituencies the state is divided into. At the same time, the states are divided into districts unevenly, they have different area and number of inhabitants. As a result, in such a populous state as California (37 691 912 inhabitants), where even the largest number of electors is represented – 55 people – in fact, one member of the electoral college represents the opinion of 685 307 residents of the state. For comparison: in the most sparsely populated state of Wyoming, where the inhabitants are represented by 3 electors, only 189,386 Americans are on their own. It turns out that both the opinion and the political decision of the inhabitants of different states in the USA are “weighed” in different ways.