@SweetAIBelle thanks.

• Every vote counts!

@kkarhan
They do!

Fortunately, Nevada sends everyone mail-in ballots, which makes voting easy. I was tracking my ballot, too, so I got confirmation both that the post office got it, and that it was received.

Unfortunately, voting isn't as easy as that in every state...

@SweetAIBelle sounds like they do it similar to Germany, abeit propably because some folks are days on foot away from the next polling station.

• Here, every eligible voter gets their stuff in the mail and has like a month time if they didn't to get that sorted out and people can directly redeem their card for a mail-in ballout or jist show up at their polling station, and with votes being mandatory on sundays, the only ones who can't attend have ample of time to vote in advance by mail.

Plus volunteers that run the polling places get paid for doing so and as part of the commitment to transparent, fair, democratic and secure elections, Germany allows everyone to monitor the entire election process (except shouldersurfing voters when they tick their boxes), so "election rigging conspiracies" have no air to stand upon.

• But then again we also banned voting machines because they'd violate the transparency demands so everyone eligible to vote can audit the election themselves and unless they'd interfere, they could literally count the ballouts by passive observancy themselves.

@kkarhan
The trouble is that the US is a big place with 50 states, and a lot of the details on how voting is done vary from state to state.

When the US was founded, they did'nt want a strong central government. In fact, people don't usually talk about the US's first try at a central government, the Articles of Confederation.

It gave the federal government way too little power, & you had, say, every state having their own money & all sorts of issues, so they wrote the Constitution to replace it & provide a stronger central government.

But, you know, it still is somewhat 50 states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a country sometimes.

The US also has this electoral college system that gives more votes to small states then they would have by population.

(If you ever wonder how the majority of the US could have voted Trump over Clinton... it didn't. Clinton got ~2.9 million more votes. But Trump got more of the electoral college votes, which was what counted.)

@SweetAIBelle I know...

And that's the absurdity...

Whereas in Germany we have voting districts of relatively precisely 300k population (as per census data) and both direct candidates (most votes per district for a party) and relative percentage across all districts that result in parlament composition, where then the parties almost always have to form coalitions.

The U.S. system results in a shitty duopoly with not much party pluralism and extremely divisive politics, tho GOP being a Trump cult is at fault for the current situation where even proud republicans like Schwarzenegger switched sides...

Not to mention the Electoral Collegue was established to give slaveowners votes on behalf of the enslaved without having them freed and granted voting rights...