American Elections Are a Joke:https://t.co/Fs6nv7vC9r pic.twitter.com/AOGCLJJul1
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 9, 2026
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The United States now has, bar none, the world's dumbest election system. The rest of the world must look on in awe as it wonders how it is that the world's richest and most heavily-armed country can't count. Even if no one is cheating, it looks horrible. If America were a face, it'd sprout a golf-ball sized herpes sore every Election Day. This has been our reality since Covid and contrary to popular belief, it's not strictly a blue-red issue, since some of our worst elections have been Democratic primaries. Every idiotic new feature is on display in California:
Covid-19 at least offered a theoretical reason why a plurality of states might make drastic changes to voting law starting in 2020, but few politicians since have articulated why we need to stay in a state of dumb emergency. California became a "mostly mail-in" state in 2022, allowing almost totally unregulated ballot harvesting (or "brokering"). This made some sense in a pandemic, but now that Americans from both parties are back to enjoying restaurant dining and Tinder sex, it should be safe to vote in person.
Nope. California not only remains joyfully stuck in "mostly mail" mode, it gives itself 30 days to count ballots that may arrive by mail if postmarked by election day.
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The 2020 Democratic presidential race was stained forever by long counting delays in primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Sanders again won the most votes, but the surprise third place finish for Amy Klobuchar led to celebration of a biological-sounding thing called the "Klobucharge." The 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary was quietly overturned and replaced by a "party-run delegate selection primary" or "nominating event" held in secret in May of that year, a thing that to this day almost no one knows about:
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Voting in the United States was easy. You showed up, experienced boredom and mild civic pride while waiting in a short line, then hopped in a booth after a yawning election worker made sure your signature was at least a vague match to the real thing. You could still commit voter fraud in lots of different ways, but asking people to make that slight detour on the way home eliminated whole universes of possible corruption. What possible upside is there in keeping this asinine "Durr we need a few more weeks to count this ****" system? Unless deploying a big fat middle finger to the public is the point, there couldn't be any, could there?
