US Election 2012

So, as we all should now know, Barack Obama was re-elected as US President for another 4 years. Many celebrated the news but some were less than enthusiastic about the result.

My opinion? If the majority of American people wanted Obama to remain president then so be it, they have the right to vote and they made their decision. They obviously believe he is the right man for the job and for solving some of America's worries. On the other hand though, maybe he got the majority vote purely because he was the better man. Whether or not people think he is up to the job, he is obviously a much better person than Romney and therefore got the majority vote.

Over here on the other side of the Atlantic, elections and the voting process differ vastly. For starters we always have three main parties running for election rather than the standard Democrats or Republicans over in the states. I've also noticed that the Americans vote using these digital voting booths which record each vote. I suspect this makes the whole vote counting process much quicker and accurate. Over here, we use the standard paper and pencil. We mark a little box next to our chosen candidate and pop it into a safe like chest. These chests then get emptied and the votes counted by hand. As you can imagine, this can be slightly inaccurate and a recount is always required. For a country as small as ours compared to the states, this process works fine and isn't too time consuming.

We also do not vote for who we want to become Prime Minister. We vote for who we want to be our local MP, or member of parliament. This MP obviously belongs to a party. When an MP is elected by it's local people, they gain a "seat" in parliament for their party. All of these seats are added up and as soon as a particular party gets the majority of seats they obtain power. The leader of this party then becomes Prime Minister. The next highest number of seats means the corresponding party are the "Backbenchers".

Unfortunately, what happened here in our last election was that neither the Conservatives or Labour gained the majority vote. We then had what's called a hung parliament. The next largest seat holder after these two parties was the Liberal Democrats. This meant that the Conservatives or Labour had to convince the Liberal Democrats to work with them in a coalition government. Once this happens, the relevant party would add the Liberal Democrats seats to theirs, meaning they would then have the majority needed to take power. The party with the most seats out of the two within a coalition would award their leader with the PM position, whereas the second party in the coalition would award their leader with Deputy PM.

We ended up with a Con-Dem coalition, making David Cameron our PM and Nick Clegg the Deputy PM. I won't go into my opinion on this because I'll be here all day and the post was supposed to be about the US elections.

When I first looked at how much money the parties in America spend on the election process I was really shocked. I mean, $3B just to get elected to power? Don't you have enough debt to sort out than adding your election bill to it! I see why they spend so much though, most of it goes on advertising in "swing states" - the states that are always undecided and make all the difference when it comes to voting.

The US takes election a lot more seriously than us. Live debates I think are a brilliant way to allow the voting population to hear what each candidate has to say about key topics. We have live debates in the UK but they're not nearly in the same league as the ones over in the US.

So, Obama has been granted another 4 years to try and sort out the problems with the US. I think the most important points are unemployment and the economy. If he can sort those two issues out then I think his reign may go on for another term after this. We'll see how he performs. Good luck Barack, you have a huge task on your plate.