Systems

The recent election here in the US had me thinking about some of the problems that I've observed with the systems that operate here. The electoral process is my first target here. It amazes me that a country as wealthy as the US, still struggles with things that I would have thought were solved problems. The electoral process here is really screwed up, a fact that I'm starting to see highlighted more and more in the news media. For a start, there's the antiquated electoral college system. I'm not 100% sure of its origins, but I imagine that it would have made sense a couple of hundred years ago, but seems a bit silly to an outsider in this day and age. Personally, I find the Westminster system of the party that wins the most seats winning government the easiest to understand. The voting system here is also weird. The person who gets the most votes wins, regardless of whether they have a majority. In Oz, we have preferential voting, which basically means that people vote in order for who they like, and the candidate who gets the least votes, gets their second preference re-allocated. This goes on until someone gts a majority. Our system appears very similar to what is know here as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) (a much sexier name than "optional preferential"). My second target is the general law enforcement system. Back home in Oz we basically have two police forces. Each state has a police department that looks after all matters of policing and there's also a federal police force, that takes care of cross-state issues, drug running, border enforcement and lots of stuff I probably have no idea of. Contrast that with the US. In the Northern Virginia area, we have lots of different police forces, seemingly unable to cooperate. We have park police, state police, town police, highway police, airport police, tollway police and I'm sure there's at least 14 more that I've missed. So when I got my car insurance card in the mail the other day and I read that the first step in reporting an accident was to call the police, I thought "which one?". Given the number of separate agencies, is it no wonder that the events that lead to 9/11 happened here. America is full of minor bureaucracies that all compete for power at the expense of the people they purport to represent. Surely this is a solved problem too.