-TSS-

Too bad that the Democrats will have find another man in 2020 as Sanders will be a bit too old to have another try.

Some people also confuse shame with embarassment.

Both main parties could actually implode within next few years.

I would change the bit about presidential elections that if a candidate receives more than 50% of the popular vote he or she wins, no matter what the EC-numbers point. So, in my proposed system Trump would still have won as Hillary also failed to get over 50%.

People always complain how a nation is divided in elections. Well, with two main-candidates that is inevitable, isnt it? Would it be preferable if there was an election where one candidate received over 90% of the votes. Then the nation couldn't be called divided. However, that if anything, would be very worrysome.

Or the dictator of Kuwait.

Russia is not the same as the old Soviet Union was. Russia is far less important even though they may not agree with that.

Some people don't think Trump is going to last long. However, if he's still president on Tuesday he won't be the shortest time president. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/historian-says-donald-trumps-presidency-likely-to-be-second-shortest-in-history-a7583181.html

Haiti shares the same tiny island with the Dominican Republic and that country is on a different level compared to Haiti which is a failed state. I don't know what they should do but continuing as they have until now is not an option.

The problem with deportations is that some countries don't accept their own citizens back, which is utterly shameful for those countries but it happens nevertheless. Another obvious problem is that since the ones who you want to deport have deliberately lost their documents and they refuse to state where they are coming from then you don't know where to deport them to.

11bn dollars was one price-tag mentioned how much the infamous wall would cost. Seems like a lot of money but to put things in perspective one must remember that the federal government spends that much in two days anyway.

Americans are used to the idea that they have the best professional sports leagues in the world; basketball, hockey, baseball. However as this is clearly not the case with soccer they don't care about the league.

It is embarassing for NATO to have a country like Turkey as one of its members.

Does Canada recognize dual-citizenship?

No, I think you have STV, single transferable vote, in mind where voters rank the candidates. That system is used in Ireland. In our system you vote for the candidate of your choice and that vote benefits the whole list which your candidate is on.

It takes quite a long time, at least a month, sometimes even two. One thing which is noteworthy about Finnish elections is that unlike most other European countries with PR we have an open list-system. That means that we vote for individual candidates who represent party-lists. For example, if a party-list is entitled to four seats in an electoral district the four candidates who got most votes on that list get elected. It is a stark contrast to the other European countries such as Sweden, Norway, Holland etc which have closed party-list elections. That means that the party puts the candidates in order of preference. I think our system is more democratic. Each MP must get his personal mandate in terms of votes and often even ministers lose their parliamentary seats, which is almost impossible in closed-list systems because they are always at the top of the list. Another aspect in our system is that apart from different lists competing against each other there is often much harder rivalry within lists than between lists.

Proportional representation in 12 multi-member electoral districts. There used to be more of those districts but some have been merged because they were so small. The smallest district in terms of seats but geographically the largest is Lapland which returns 7 MPs. Funnily exactly the other way round, the smallest geographic district in Soithern-Finland returns 35 MPs, by far the largest number. Our parliament is also very fragmented, more so than in any other European country I know of. The largest party gets almost every time only 20-22% of the votes.

One can't help getting an impression that Trump isn't very familiar with the US constitution; things like how each branch of government functions and what are the limits to their power.

IIRC the Irish constitution states that the ratio between MP and the number of inhabitants may not exceed 30000. They recently reduced the size of their parliament from 166 to 158. I guess their constitution didn't allow them to reduce it more as their population is around 4.7m. A meaningless gesture really. If there is a problem of too large parliament such reduction means nothing. If they stick to their 30000-rule they probably will have to increase the size of parljament at the next election. A different story in Hungary. Their parliament consisted of 386 members. Many much bigger countries don't have such a large parliament. They finally realised that their parliament was too large and changed the constition to allow to reduce it to 199 members which is a more sensible number for their country.

No, we have a unicameral 200 member parliament which is ridiculously large for a country of our size if you ask me.

Does Canada apply some sort of political science rule about the cubic root of the population as to determine the correct number of MP's? 35m cubic root is 330, more or less. Here in Finland we have a population of 5.5 million and a parliament of 200 members, which is ridiculously large for a country of our size.

I wonder how much more can Israel grow in terms of population; after all, it is a very tiny strip of land. Most European countries have larger counties than the size of the state of Israel. On top of that despite their area being tiny still about 1/3 of it is largely uninhabitable desert. Therefore the areas where people actually live are very densely populated. The current population of Israel is over 8 millon people.

I could imagine that one riding somewhere in Toronto would be a couple of blocks while another riding further north would be the size of an average Eutopean country.

Canada was clever to hurry up a trade deal with the EU while Trump is antagonising the EU. If that is Trudeau's credit then he isnt as useless as some make him to be. However, I understand that the negotiations for that deal had been going on for years.

Do people in Canada trust that the constituencies, or ridings as you seem to call them, are not gerrymandered but honestly divided to include as equal number of voters as is practically possible?