New minority government in canada

Way to find the rainbow!

 

There's a lot to like about the more parliamentary nature of the Canadian system. One of the drawbacks of our own system, IMHO, is that it lends itself to domination by two factions.

 

the electoral college are a group of people that vote for president according to the popular vote of each state. unless im forgetting something from high school... which i probably am.

 

our prime minister is a real snake in the grass. i am very relieved he didn't get a majority government. i wish canadians were smarter and voted ndp or green...

 

The Electoral college isn't bound to vote in line with the popular vote. They can differ from the people's choice but can't recall a time when they've done that off hand.

 

In the States, we don't vote directly for the president, we vote for electors, which are appointed by our state legislatures, who pledge to vote for our preferred candidate in the EC. As WarWolf said, these electors aren't specifically bound to vote their pledge, but in practice, they almost always do. There are 538 electors -- each state has a number of electors equal to the number of its senators and representatives, and DC is given a number of electors equal to that held by the smallest state.

This can be good and bad. To the good, it allows every state to have a voice in the Presidential election -- the US is an urban nation, and a majority of the population is concentrated in ten or twenty major cities, so a popular-vote campaign would address the issues important to only those locales. To the bad, voters in sparsely populated states carry a disproportionate amount of influence relative to voters in large states. Take my home state of NY, for example -- it is the third most populous state in the union, with around 20 million people, and carries 31 electoral votes. VT, next door, is the second from the least populous, with about 620,000 people, and carries 3 electoral votes. So, NY has over 32 times the population of VT, but only 10 times the number of electoral votes. So, each voter in VT has 3.2 times as much influence over the Presidential election as each voter in NY. Personally, I think the good outweighs the bad, but there's certainly room for debate.

 

In Canada we vote for our local MPs which earns seats for that party, and whichever party earns the most seats wins the election.

There's no "Stephen Harper" or "Jack Layton" on the voting slip.

We were trying to pass a bill a couple years ago where you could vote for your favourite local party and your favourite federal party, in case you want a certain party in power in Ottawa and a different party in power locally. It's a great idea, but the major parties (read: Conservatives and Liberals) campaigned strongly against it because they would've lost a lot of seats.

 

Interesting -- that's somewhat similar to how our Congressional leadership is selected.