Are U.S.A. elections rigged?

[Kalbear]

Also note that while the UK has FPTP voting, they do it for seats, not for a winner-take-all presidency. And that makes a pretty big difference. Not having a president and having a party (or coalition) appointed prime minister means that the party or parties have a lot more power than they do in the US, as witnessed by the hostile takeover from Trump. 

Really good breakdown, by the way, @yukle. Thanks for this.

[The Marquis de Leech]

2 hours ago, felice said:

Yes, and the Lib-Dems and their ancestors are responsible for basically every Tory victory ever, due to splitting the left-ish vote with Labour. 

The SDP, yes. Not the Liberals, who from WWII onwards used to split the bourgeois vote with the Tories (seriously, a major reason Labour lost 1951 was that the Liberals ran fewer candidates than 1950). 

[litechick]

TL;DR

Who cares why it is on Tuesday?  There could be objections to any day of the week.

"Rigged" --the Republicans are better at gerrymandering, the Democrats are better at tweaking the recount in their favor.  Give and take.

[Yukle]

13 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Gerrymandering is an issue, and certainly the reason the GOP kept the House in 2012 despite Democratic candidates gaining 1.4 million more votes, but its impact and scope is often overwrought by scholars and especially pundits.  While slightly higher in the House, the incumbency advantage is enormous in both the House and Senate.  Obviously, there is no gerrymandering in the Senate, so there are other factors that contribute to the dearth of competitive contests.  As mentioned by @The hairy bear, this is in part due to the fact many communities have increasingly aligned preferences.  This is called geographic sorting, has been empirically demonstrated, and helps drive polarization in the electorate.  The fundraising advantage of incumbents - and increasing gap between incumbents and challengers - is also commonly identified as a key factor.  

This is a case where the numbers really don't lie, I think. The United States simply doesn't have competitive districts anywhere near what Australia and other nations that forbid gerrymandering have. As I show in the OP - it's about a fifth of the level.

Incumbency and geographic sorting aren't unique to the U.S.A. and yet they have a ridiculously small number of competitive districts. It's not the only factor but it is the largest single factor in why the Republican Party controls 31 state legislatures' upper and lower houses and both Federal Houses. Incumbency also shouldn't be a factor - unless one party already has a large advantage that the other party doesn't (such as drawing their own electoral boundaries).

There will be times when the general mood will swing, but such a lengthy period of dominance by one party is unrepresentative - the general split of partisanship within the U.S.A. is not a 2:1 Republican:Democrat ratio, and while it's not a perfect 1:1, it's more or less close enough.

Instead, gerrymandering is the *cause* of the overwhelming lack of uncompetitive districts and geographic sorting is a contributing factor to exacerbating its effects. Which is why states continue to use it.