> > Democracy = elect whoever the people actually want to elect, even if you don't like their choice. That rather rules out what happens in, say, the USofA, where entrenched party politics limits the choice of the wider population to those few candidates that are backed.

It’s also weird in that the candidate with the most votes might not win. The electoral system is weird.

Sure .. but 'less' so.

In the EU, European Union, member countries are voting on EU positions .. whether it's weighted or unweighted, it's a collection of N countries voting, not a collection of N millions of people voting.

Similarly in the USofA, formed as a union of states to have a common government for those things that are agreed to superseded individual state interests.

I live in a country with mandatory voting - everybody (of age, save for those convicted of _serious_ crime) votes, and ranked proportional voting.

Compulsory voting offends the sensibilities of a number of USofA citizens, but there is a strong case to be made for it, ranked voting does a lot to avoid two party Hotelling's law quagmires where major parties barely represent anybody and yet MySportingTeam divisions dominate.