Is our way of electing a president really that unusual?

A commenter on a recent post by Pierre Lemieux wrote:

The only chance Trump has (and had) at the presidency is due to the secretive system used in America to elect presidents (why not use direct presidential elections like the rest of the world?… it’s so much clearer and easy to understand!… even France left the electoral colleges in 1962!!)

The commentator could be right about the presidencies of other countries. I don’t know enough to know.

But if he extends it to Prime Ministers, he is wrong. The parliamentary system that I, as a Canadian, grew up with is one in which the Prime Minister is the one who heads the party with a majority of MPs. (Or, if it’s a coalition government, the prime minister is the head of the party that put together a coalition that includes a majority of parliament. That’s the case with Justin Trudeau in Canada, whose coalition depends on having NDP members.) Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia have similar parliamentary systems.

It is very similar to an electoral voting system. Your party may get fewer votes than the other major party, but if they are well distributed, you can get a majority of seats in parliament, or at least more seats than the other major party. That happened twice in Canada in the last ten years. In the September 2021 electionsIf the candidate whose party won the most votes had become Prime Minister, we would call Erin O’Toole Prime Minister O’Toole. In the October 2019 electionsIf the candidate whose party won the most votes had become Prime Minister, we would have called the Prime Minister Prime Minister Andrew Scheer at the end of 2019.

I wrote about this in 2021. One commenter made a very good point. I’ll quote the parts I agree with:

A popular vote for a president brings its own problems.

1. You encourage corruption in your strong positions. Democrats in California, for example, don’t have to cheat to win California. But if adding 100,000 votes could make sense overall, why not? This is not specific; Republicans in Republican strongholds would face the same incentive.

2. Uniform voting rules are needed. That is far from self-evident. Ideal. If you don’t have uniform voting rules, then the popular vote is not really the popular vote.

3. How do you handle recounts at the national level when the vote is close?

Note: The photo above is from Parliament Hill in Ottawa.