Journal of Modern Science (Jul 2019)

AMERICAN ELECTION MEANDERS

  • Wojciech Niklas

DOI
https://doi.org/10.13166/jms/109738
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 41, no. 2
pp. 273 – 294

Abstract

Read online

The election of the President of the United States is one of the most complicated choices in the history of democracy. American electoral peculiarity is that it is paradoxically not the voters who have the final and decisive influence on election results, and electors who are obligated to loyalty to their voters only by moral law, because in most states the consequences of their possible "betrayal" are strongly liberalized penalties in the form of a thousand-dollar mandate or dismissal from office. Another electoral specifics is that the result of elections is most influenced by states with the largest populations, as they are the ones with the largest number of electors. A brief analysis of the relations of the American colonies with England, France, Spain and other European powers shows the genesis of the contemporary electoral system in the USA, which, contrary to the popular opinions of hundreds of millions of people, is difficult to call ideal or perfect because of the "systemic electoral gap". Also, the results of the analysis of American historical documents regarding the constitution may be a substantive basis for polemics about the still-promoted myth of the magnificent democracy created by the Founding Fathers, in which white women, white men without property and colorful people did not have the right to vote.

Keywords