"In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting ... they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that's it," Putin said, without providing evidence. Putin's opponents say the March election in Russia is no real contest as the president wields unchallenged power and his main rival, Alexei Navalny, is serving more than 30 years in jail on charges that Navalny says were trumped up. They say the use of electronic voting creates scope for authorities to manipulate the vote in Putin's favour without detection.

(Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a new six-year term in an election that his opponents say is a parody of democracy, said on Tuesday that past U.S. elections had been rigged by postal voting.

“In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting … they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,” Putin said, without providing evidence.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Originally the electors were actually meant to deliberate. It was supposed to be a no party system.

    In practice the electors have never demonstrated any independence from the political power that sent them there.

    Then you have states having to figure out how they select those electors, under the eyes of voters. Back then the representative to voter ratio was a lot smaller so losing your seat was a lot easier. So they did the politically reasonable thing and made the electors an elected position.

    It wasn’t long before that transformed into candidates selecting their electors, and people just selecting the candidate on the ballot.

    So electoral college remains now as a compromise between large population states and small population states. And the backup. Which is supposed to be Congress voting by state, is similarly population balanced because they get one vote per state in that instance.

    This all made a lot of sense in a semi-decentralized country that wasn’t supposed to have parties. Unfortunately parties formed literally right away. Also, since the Civil War we’ve been a lot more centralized. But we’re stuck with old voting systems because if we held a Constitutional Convention to update it then the Republicans would do stupid shit.