Betteridge's Law Of Newspaper Headlines:
If a newspaper has a question for a headline, then the answer to that question is 'no'.
On Sunday, the Republic of Ireland voted for the next Dáil. While it looks like neither of the previously major parties are going to have a majority in their own right, it also doesn't look like Sinn Féin will be the larger of what ever coalition government is likely to emerge out of this (mostly because they only fielded candidates in 42 of 160 seats). Probably Sinn Féin will end up being kingmakers for the next government and they may even have a say in who the next Taioseach is.
In a country which has been known for its troubles, the whole election took place with absolutely no hint of voter suppression, voting machines breaking down, or interference from foreign powers (though it could be argued that Sinn Féin has been doing that in the UK for more than a century).
Ireland has managed to hold an election on a Sunday in a chronically Catholic country, done it on paper ballots, and used the Single Transferrable Vote; which all means to say that it has done a better job than the United States at doing an election.
This is because the voting system in Ireland is sensible; whereas the American voting system is not. While that previous sentence sounds like it has ended in the wrong place, it also has not. In essence, the system in which someone becomes President of the United States is so much of a decentralised and gobbledygooky entanglement of nonsense, that it is not really a system and in a lot of cases, doesn't have anything to do with voting.
Caucuses:
It has taken a week for the Democratic Party of Iowa to determine the results of its caucus votes, due to reporting on an app which nobody received any prior training in and which crashed on the night. The mere fact that the app was created by a company called Shadow Inc. should have been enough for any sane person to be suspicious and for any would be superhero to suspect the work of either foreign interference, or by interference from a supervillain.
To be fair, the idea of a caucus in a very small community is sensible. If everyone moves around the room to show support for a thing, then that works out very well; provided that the thing you are voting for only affects that community. For anything larger, then it is a lot of a nonsense.
The Iowa Caucuses are still basically winner takes all systems on a precinct by precinct basis, except that there are multiple rounds of voting. They have managed to combine the Single Transferrable Vote with the vagrancies of letting old people loose with smart phones. Not only is electronic voting a terrible idea but if you give old people an app that they don't know how to use, then you should expect a total omnishambles.
Delegate Systems:
I can understand why the party owners and controllers would want to put their thumb on the scale; which is why the Democratic Party has so-called 'unbound' Super Delegates who can vote however they like and without reference to the wishes of the people but it's not really that democratic, is it?
The two parties engage in their own chicanery here and while people should be grateful that there are open primaries at all, it stomps all over the principle of 'one person, one vote'.
This system is then not only duplicated but baked into the Constitution, which deliberately overeggs the pudding with its delegate count for the Electoral College.
Many states use a winner take all system; after using a most votes wins system; which ensures that when you have anything more than two candidates, then you are almost always guaranteed to have someone elected with a minority of votes. Defenders of the system will point to its simplicity or other such nonsense but where you have a majority of people who did not vote for a thing, then you do not have the approval of the electorate.
The Democratic Party adopted the idea of superdelegates after the 1968 Democratic Convention which resulted in rioting both outside and inside the venue, and which finally resulted in the election of Republican Richard Nixon at the general election in November.
Both of these things are of themselves sort of all right ideas but for anything more than about 100 people, they simply do not work. The idea that you even have open primaries has only existed since the middle of last century and is probably a bad idea.
Solution?
There isn't one.
The United States is vicious in its defence that it has a 'republican form of government' and is deeply suspicious of the federal government. This means that there are fifty independent little kingdoms with no kings and with private organisations running their own voting systems, the chance of any central organisation is precisely nil. Where have private organisation of the systems for public office, with no governance or oversight, then the chance that the system will either be broken or corrupt is all but guaranteed. I've even heard it said that America isn't a democracy; which sounds to me like the people have accepted for a long time that things are never going to get better.
The United States is crying out for an independent electoral commission, paper ballots, preferential voting, maybe proportional representation in the House of Representatives, voting on a Saturday, as well as post election scrutineering of votes but it won't get any of these things because it vehemently chooses not to.
The people in charge like the system being broken because it means that they get to stay in charge. If democracy suddenly broke out and people actually got to decide their own destiny then things would change.
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