Currently the US is in the process of determining who will be the candidates. These are the primaries and caucuses. In a primary, each voter goes into a voting booth and votes for a single candidate. At a caucus, voters meet in homes, schools, etc and pretty much determine there who they vote for. In both cases, the votes are counted to determine how the delegates (I'll explain in a moment) are awarded. The political party in each state determines how many delegates each state gets and how delegates are awarded, whether it is winner take all or split based on the votes.

Delegates then go to the political convention of their respective party. The delegates vote for the candidate they were assigned to, based on the primaries and caucuses. The candidate of each party that gets the most delegates is the final candidate of the party. The Democrats have something called the Super Delegate, who can change his vote to a different candidate then who he was assigned to.

At this point, we're down to one Republican and one Democrat and a handfull of candidates from other parties and independents.

In November, we go to vote on one of those candidates. This is the popular vote. The candidate that wins each state then gets that state's votes in the Electoral College. I think this was explained in another post in this thread. The winner in the Electoral College vote is then the President.

Yes, it's a screwed up system, but it was created by the Founding Fathers. Small states did not want big states to dictate everything and the Electoral College was created because of that.


>I'm trying to understand how the political system of the US work and I need your help to clear the things up.
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>For comparison, here in Canada, the political leader of a party is choosen by the (paying) members of the party. We don't vote for a delegate, we vote directly for the leader of our choice. As I understood it, in the US you vote for a delegate that will vote for you. Why is this? Why can't you vote directly for Clinton, Obama or McCain for exemple?
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>In the US, the vote for the presidency is spread accross many weeks. It seem to me anti-democratic because the last states to vote know the previous results and it will affect how they vote. When there's a vote here in Canada, either for an election or for the leader of the party, the vote is done in one day. More than that, it take into account the different time zones and try to hide the results of the eastern provinces to the western provinces until the western provinces poll boots closes. Why not do the same thing in the US? Is it the same thing for the general election?
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>Here we have 4 parties who share the power in the parliament. The US seem to have only 2 parties (Democrats and Republicans). Why only 2? Is it in the Constitution?
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>In the US, it seem that you vote once for the president and once for the parties. That's a good thing IMHO. Here we can only vote for a party in a general election. The leader of that party is automatically named the Prime Minister. I also like very much the law that limit the number of mandates to 2. I whish that this law could be adopted here in Canada.