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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Personally, being more familiar with European parliamentary systems, I find it quite astounding that the canidate selection is such an open an public process.

In many countries, the parties select candidates internally and then present them to the public. Letting non-party members vote or register just before voting would be unthinkable there.

Then again, this is probably a necessary result of the US political system: majority voting rules, therefore (basically) only two parties, and of course, the US is huge and diverse.

The whole process is ridiculously long and expensive. But it's also a way to get people familiar with the candidates early on.

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We did it that way until the early to mid twentieth century, when a populist backlash against that good ol' boys system led to more or less the primary setup we have now. It still varies a lot year to year and party to party.For instance, the Republicans' system was quite a bit more democratic than the Democrats' this year. (You can draw your own conclusions from that on the relative value of the two models.)

It's an odd hybrid where the parties are private organizations that can make their own decisions and rules, but their leadership elections are run by state apparatus. This (understandably) confuses people, to the point that most people seem to think of the parties as almost part of the governmental system.

As others have noted, this all goes back to our winner-take-all elections, which are a kind of original sin in our system, which we'll probably never be able to change. In other systems, which encourage more parties, it is much easier to abandon a party if you don't like the leaders they pick, so it is not as important to be invested in the actual process of picking those leaders.

The Atlantic had a really good article on some of these topics recently: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-amer...

Looking at things from Canada, I feel the same way.

These primaries, from what I can gather, are roughly the equivalent of the leadership selection process that happens with the political parties here. There is media coverage of those, but not to the extent that the US has. They're also run by the parties themselves, whereas the voting process seems to be handled by the individual states' election authorities.

In Canada, Elections Canada doesn't really get involved in the process that the parties use to select their leader. It just does the general election, by-elections, etc.

>But it's also a way to get people familiar with the candidates early on.

That is largely what it is all about. It is basically theater. All the rules are made by the political parties themselves whether their own rules or by the state laws they have voted for. In the 1800s they just nominated whomever they wanted (and this is basically what the smaller political parties do since they are so small they don't have the money to do these long extended campaigns) but then they started doing the primaries and caucuses to give people input.

Edit (re: reply by dagss): I seem to have misunderstood the comment, but can't delete anymore.

In Portugal it's just 7500, though our President doesn't really have that much power, he's more of a figurehead.

This is referring to who becomes candidate og Republican or Democratic parties. I am sure anyone can become presidential candidate in just the same way in the US - but not representing those parties.

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