Well, no. The flaw in my comment. But my main intent was to speak to the broken nature of American "democracy", as it is called. In Australia, we don't elect

Well, no. The flaw in my comment. But my main intent was to speak to the broken nature of American "democracy", as it is called. In Australia, we don't elect a president, so we don't have primaries. The head of state - the Governor General - is almost never involved in the process. Instead, the leader of the party that has a parliamentary majority (and therefore forms government) becomes the Prime Minister. And the party leader is selected in whatever arcane manner the party desires. People vote for party representatives or independents at the level of their local electorate. The prime minister (Australia) doesn't get to override the parliament by decree. And since the house of representatives and senate are functional, decrees are unnecessary. What we don't have is: * Gerrymandering. Electoral boundaries are drawn fairly by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). * Rules that take away people's right to vote. Our voter participation rates are about 90%[1] in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. If you don't have an opinion, you show up at the polling booths, get your name ticked off, draw a nice big cock on the ballot papers and drop them in the box, or just walk out. * Endless filibustering. We do have Double Dissolution[2] (the nuclear option) where both the House and the Senate are dissolved (if only there was a big vat of acid!) and everyone goes back to the polls. It's very rarely used, but occasionally threatened. * First-past-the-post voting: we use a ranked-choice system called preferential voting, where if your first choice doesn't get a majority, your vote transfers to your second choice etc.[3] That means we do not have a two party system and you can not waste your vote by voting for someone other than the big two. * Other American shitfuckery that I can't think of right now. But we do have some American-style donation shitfuckery that I wish we could fix. Money has disproportionate say in our political system, though it is far less broken than American politics. [1] https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/federal_elections/voter-turnout.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/federal_elections/voter-tur... [2] https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/having-your-say/elections-and-voting/double-dissolution/ https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/having-your-say... [3] https://www.chickennation.com/voting/ https://www.chickennation.com/voting/