So what you’re saying is that it’s not a democracy, it just pretends to be one?
There are many examples in the UK, but the most glaring to me are 1983 and 2005, election years.
In 1983 the Labour Party got 27.6% of the vote and 269 seats; the Liberal/SDP Alliance got 25.4% of the vote and 11 seats.
In 2005 the Conservatives for 32.4% of the vote and 198 seats; Labour got 35.2% of the vote and 355 seats.
No.
There are other factors that are relevant to the OP that weren’t included.
Senate seats come up every 6 years, so after three different 2 year cycles, the entire senate will be recycled.
Before the 2010 election, the democrats held 59 senate seats (57 democrats, 2 independents who caucus with the dems). The GOP held 41.
Results from senate elections
2010 - 29.1 vs 32.7 million votes (D vs. R)
2012 50 vs 39.1 million votes (D vs. R)
2014 20.8 vs. 24.6 million votes (D vs. R)
So in the entire 6 year life cycle of the senate where all 100 seats are up for grabs, the democrats won 99.9 million votes to the GOP winning 96.4 million votes.
Yet despite the democrats winning 3.5 million more votes over 3 cycles, their number of seats went from 59 down to 46. The OP lists votes for 2012, 2014 and 2016 senate elections, which show an even bigger majority of democratic voters for democratic senators. However I picked 2010-2014 since republicans tend to do better in midterm elections than presidential year elections. Despite this, the GOP still won a ton of seats despite getting less votes.
So yes, a very good argument that the senate is not representative can be made, the dems won more votes over 6 years and lost 13 seats.
On the subject of the house, the GOP gerrymandered heavily after winning in 2010 which was a census year. The house is supposed to represent population.
In 2012, the democrats won 59.6 million votes vs. 58.2 million for the GOP. The end result of seats was 234 R vs 201 D. So the democrats won the popular vote by 1.2% in 2012, yet still lost the house by 33 seats.
As the OP says, in the last 16 years there have been 2 occasions where the democrat won the popular vote for the presidency but lost the presidency due to the EC.
So the democrats have won the popular vote for the presidency and lost it twice
Won the popular vote for the senate (over 6 years) and lost 14 seats
Won the popular vote for the house and lost by 33 seats.
It is a fucked up system. I don’t know what other nation has a similar system.
I admire the OPs optimism with the use of ‘democracy’.
That is itself a POV based upon the concept of the election as a horse race with the winner being the “first past the post” – itself in a mutual reinforcement loop with the notion of there being only a couple of real contender parties. When you are accustomed to results such as Party A 45%, Party B 42%, Party C 7%, Party D 4%, you have a different POV about who’s the obvious winner than if your normality involves Party A 33%, Party B 30%, Party C 20%, Party D 10%, Party E 5% – as in, do you really want someone that 67% of the people voted *against *to be fully in charge.
(As it stands several US states ***do ***have a runoff method of election, so in some of them mere bare plurality is not enough to elect.)
On the “it’s a feature not a bug” hand, however, the system as it works in the US is premised on coalitions, if any, being assembled ad-hoc, issue-by-issue, and that the structural and procedural checks-and-balances (federalism, independent branches, rules of procedure in courts and legislatures) will be enough to put a brake on a large plurality faction imposing its will.
A pretty simple basic list is given here
Basic info on elections here
Brief introduction of plusses and minuses of presidential vs. parliamentary system here
As far as Us being typical I think Wikipedia sums it up pretty good:
*Party-list proportional representation is the single most common electoral system and is used by 80 countries, and involves voters voting for a list of candidates proposed by a party. In closed list systems voters do not have any influence over the candidates put forward by the party, but in open list systems voters are able to both vote for the party list and influence the order in which candidates will be assigned seats. In some countries, notably Israel and the Netherlands, elections are carried out using ‘pure’ proportional representation, with the votes tallied on a national level before assigning seats to parties. However in most cases several multi-member constituencies are used rather than a single nationwide constituency, giving an element of geographical representation. However, this can result in the distribution of seats not reflecting the national vote totals. As a result, some countries have leveling seats to award to parties whose seat totals are lower than their proportion of the national vote.
*
There is nothing particularly unusual about the US. It would be highly unusual for a large country to have something like a majoritarian system.
If you want to start with specific countries, maybe Switzerland?
Somewhat similar to the current U.S. situation, South Africa was a white-supremacist democracy during the apartheid era.
I didn’t say the U.S. was typical.
I said “there is nothing “unusual” about a federal system.” That was a direct quote from John Mace, made because the two of you seemed to be saying opposite things about our system.
I thought both of you were being unhelpful in your first replies. Uncharitable, even.
Remembet that in the CA senate race there were 2 Dem candidates and 0 Reps. That kinda unbalances the overall senate vote totals.
Yeah, and I made the mistake of saying the loser’s total should count for the Republicans. That should be true in most circumstances, but not in the somewhat unusual case in CA. But still, that statistic is complete bullshit, and is another example of why posters here should be more careful when quoting advocacy sites, whether from the left or right, instead of objective news sources like the NYT. I took one look at those numbers and all kinds of red flags went up.
I apologize if I was being “uncharitable” by correcting that factual error in the OP.
So you claim.
Anyways, parties aren’t entitled to anything in the US system regardless of arbitrary aggregate votes. Furthermore, in the United States, geographic distribution matters more in many ways than self selected political party branding.
Each state having two senators and the presence of the electoral college is something every elementary school child should know. It’s no surprise. It’s no great mystery. Yet people are still befuddled.
And it’s not going to change. 3/4 of the states are not going to vote to give up power in order to empower California, Texas, NY, and Florida even more. Millions move for more favorable economic reasons. Why not move to one of these significantly better run countries for political reasons? We hear it every election and yet never see it.
I doubt anyone is befuddled. Sane people acknowledge that it’s a corrupt and unfair antiquity handed down by our beloved, slave-fucking “founding fathers,” though.
Freedom of speech wad also handed down by our slave-fucking founding fathers. Ban it!!!
Perhaps, but the federal system has the additional demerit of being (partly) constructed to please less-populated slave states, so “slave-fucking” is not tangential or a non-sequitur in the context of the conversation, but something that was/is deeply embedded in the federal system. Also, unlike freedom of speech, it is undemocratic and should be abandoned.
It should only be absndoned because in the moment the other side has the majority. When your side regains the majority it will go back to being one of our glorious institutions. I also suggest you read up on the concept of checks and balances and the tyranny of the majority. The Senate is a feature; not a bug.
FTR…democracy was founded by a slave state since this seems to be some kind of a disqualifier.
First-past-the-post certainly has issues (and many electoral systems have means of fixing those issues, like two-round run-off system the French use). But in both those examples most people would agree Party A one and Party B lost, and a system that allowed Party B to form a government but not Party A is deeply flawed and undemocratic.
But there is a big difference between those issues and what happened in 2000 and 2016 (not forgetting the US is also a first-past-the-post system, as witnessed by the Clinton election wins). A system that actually favours the losing party over the winning one is pretty broken, and wouldn’t be accepted in any other country I know of.
You see, in the UK, there is the very real chance that your MP isnt from your locality and might not be aware of your local issues. Please tell me how this system is better?
Well my local MP may be a feudal overlord 
But he is local. But that is a complete non sequitur. I certainly wouldn’t hold up the British parliamentary system as a shining example of well designed electoral system.
The US system has all the flaws of first-past-the-post, like the British system, but on top of that it has the electoral college which means the “losing” party can form a government instead of the “winning” party. That is a whole level of flawed on top of the issues with first-past-the-post.